A Palestinian home that refuses to forget: Deena Helm's Our Cut of Salt and the haunting legacy of the Nakba

In 2024, as Israel's genocide in Gaza reached its height, Deena Helm found herself escaping into the world of horror. The Palestinian-American writer started reading horror novels voraciously as a response to the genocide whose horrors were never-ending. At least in a novel, the horrors were confined between the book's covers.

What interested her most, Deena tells The New Arab, were stories about haunted houses.

Palestine, a country where millions of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes time and time again, may very well have the most haunted houses in the world.

"I thought this just makes sense," says Deena. "I was seeing the destruction of buildings, homes and hospitals [in Gaza] and thinking about what gets passed down to future generations without people necessarily knowing that they carry something like that, and also what gets passed down in the history of the buildings that are left standing when they've witnessed all of this destruction and they've also survived through it."

The epigenetics of trauma and haunted houses are the foundations of Deena Helm’s debut novel Our Cut of Salt (Orbit Books, September 2026).

Indeed, the novel falls into the genre of historical horror, but what makes it even more disturbing is the fact that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which Helm describes in the book, is still taking place.

Set in the year 2002, during the second Intifada, mixed-race Palestinian, Italian and American Marina has just graduated from university, and her Tata Nuhad, her Palestinian maternal grandmother, has recently passed away.

Nuhad was displaced from her childhood home in Haifa during the Nakba and named her daughter, Marina’s mother, after her beloved home city.

Fresh from graduation and not yet employed, Marina feels it is high time to go to Haifa to understand who she is and where she comes from.

She is half Palestinian, and yet that part of her has been so closely guarded from her by both her mother and grandmother.

Haifa does not want Marina to go to Haifa – and neither does Nuhad, whose ghost now haunts her daughter. Haifa eventually relents and lets Marina go, but against her mother’s wishes, Marina visits Nuhad’s childhood home in Haifa. And that is when all hell breaks loose.

Through it all, Marina has an inexplicable fear of going near water; whenever she is near a lake or the sea, she feels a pull toward its depths and ends up falling in and nearly drowning.

What she does not know yet is that this is what binds her to Nuhad and to Nuhad’s childhood home. This is the unexplained passing down of intergenerational trauma.

After being forcibly displaced by Zionists during the Nakba and her family being murdered by them, Nuhad’s childhood home has become not only haunted but also a dark force that works hand in hand with death to kill every Israeli settler who inhabits it.

Situated just metres away from the Mediterranean Sea, the sea and the house work hand in hand to drown every Israeli resident, similar in ways to American Horror Story Season 1’s Murder House, where every new inhabitant mysteriously dies and never leaves the house.

Explaining the link between death, the sea and the house, Deena says, "The sea and the house are connected. They are both separate entities, but the house, because it has so much lore with the Mediterranean Sea and [Nuhad’s family] had so much of their own family history tied to the sea, I wanted to make it so the house had an access point through the sea, and the sea had an access point through the house. They were intrinsically connected because of this shared family history that connected the two."

The house has pledged not to stop until its family – Nuhad’s family – returns.

What is moving and incredibly powerful is the idea that Palestinian houses that have been stolen by Israeli settlers are not empty shells; they are living entities that are intrinsically linked to the Palestinian families that owned and lived in them.

Deena's haunted house becomes a living, breathing entity that carries the hurt and grief of having lost Nuhad and her family. It pledges to stay empty by any means possible until her family eventually returns.

"Death cast a shadow over the city after what happened [the Nakba]," Deena tells The New Arab.

"The house, initially feeling lost and not really understanding what happened and why its family went away, turned to that being that was over the city and sinking below into the ocean [i.e. death]. It turned to the presence of death that was already there as basically a way out for its own feelings and not being able to understand what happened."

Deena says she has watched scores of horror movies and read countless horror novels (she cites the Pixar movie Monster House and White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi as two of her inspirations), and has researched the Nakba, but the book is not based on her own Palestinian family.

However, there is one scene in the book – Marina lands in Tel Aviv, leans against an old stone Palestinian house and realises there are bullet holes and vomits – which was inspired by something that actually happened to Deena.

"I grew up spending a lot of time in Palestine, and I even lived there briefly and studied there. A lot of my lived experiences influence the story in the book," explains Deena.

"During one visit, as we were passing through Tel Aviv, I was seeing all of these really old buildings, and you could see this modern facade stamped onto them. It was this really strange feeling, and it actually made me sick. I had so many overwhelming emotions. I couldn’t understand how anyone could live here and just be okay with everything that [happened]. You can physically see the history that people are living in."

Interspersed with Marina’s story is the story of Nuhad and her family, the Sayadis, a name whose root means "to catch fish" in Arabic, who own the city’s largest fishing supply store.

Here is the family’s intrinsic link to the sea.

Nuhad’s carefree childhood is quickly curtailed by the 1948 Nakba. Deena writes about the ethnic cleansing of Haifa in vivid detail.

What is shocking is that the tactics employed by the Haganah in 1948, such as playing recordings of people and children screaming through loudspeakers to lure Palestinians out of their homes, were the same tactics that Israeli occupation forces used recently in Gaza (i.e. playing recordings of babies crying to lure Palestinians out to help them before murdering them).

"That actually happened," says Deena. "They were playing that and hoping to either frighten people enough to leave themselves or to come [out to] help and then exploit that and carry out mass murder that way.

"I found out that the Nakba in Haifa happened over the course of two days. It was really fast compared to many other places. I found an hour-by-hour account. The chapter on the Nakba was the hardest to write; I put it off for a long time. My grandmother was partly from Haifa, and I didn’t want to feel what she went through or read about it in such detail. Eventually, I just did it all in one go over one day, and I cried a lot."

Despite local Palestinians warning Marina not to go to Nuhad’s childhood home, she finds herself being pulled there.

But it seems the house, perhaps panicked that it will lose its family again, does not want to let Marina go.

Marina manages to escape but has now been made sick by the house, and Haifa, who has avoided the city she was named after, has to come for her daughter and face her fears head-on.

Close behind her is Nuhad’s ghost. And there, in the haunted childhood home, all three generations of women must help one another and break free from everything holding them back.

"I think the biggest lesson from my book is that things will be passed down; emotions will be passed down from previous generations, whether you realise it or not," says Deena. 

"We’re all part of something bigger. We have our individual lives, but I don't think they're created in isolation. We're part of a grander history that includes things you'll never know about."

Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press

Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA