Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and the prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on Monday in Haifa, the mixed Jewish-Arab city in Israel where he lived. He was 97.
His death was announced by the office of President Isaac Herzog of Israel, who in a statement extolled Mr. Michael as a “giant among giants.”
Like many exiles, Mr. Michael (pronounced mee-KAH-ale) had one foot planted in the country where he settled and the other in the country he left behind. He fled Iraq in 1948 after the outbreak of war between the newly formed nation of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Iraq among them. As a Jew and a Communist activist, he had been threatened with prison and execution in Iraq.
In Israel, he said, he found that as a 23-year-old refugee from the Middle East, he was looked down upon and treated like a second-class citizen by Jews of European origin.
“When he came to Israel, he wasn’t seen as equal to the European immigrants, and he had to fight against that,” said Nancy E. Berg, a professor of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael” (2004). “That led him to the kinds of things he writes about in his books.”
A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew, and when he did, he published his first novel in 1974, with the title “All Men Are Equal — But Some Are More,” a variation on a quotation from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” (The title has also been rendered in English as “Equal and More Equal.”)
The book is set in the squalid transit camps that housed immigrants, known in Hebrew as Mizrahim, or Easterners, who had escaped persecution in Arabic countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The protagonist, David, a child of those camps, performs valiantly in the Israeli-Arab War of 1967 but learns that his heroism and professional expertise do not insulate him against discrimination.
In the novel “Refuge” (1977), an Iraqi-Jewish character is grateful to Israel for giving him asylum after years in an Iraqi prison, but he is disillusioned by the difference in economic and social status between the Mizrahim and European Jews.
Mr. Michael went on to write “A Handful of Fog” (1979), which is set in the 2,500-year-old community of Babylonian Jews in Iraq. In the novel, he depicts the colorful, ethnically diverse life that flourished there in the 1930s and ’40s but that later edged toward extinction with the persecutions and expulsions of Jews following Israel’s gaining independence in 1948.
His other novels include “Victoria” (1995), a best seller in Israel centering on the patriarchal world of a Jewish woman in Baghdad; and “A Trumpet in the Wadi,” (2003), which traces the romance between a Christian Arab woman and a Russian Jewish immigrant and touches on the hostility that Israeli Arabs sometimes face in their dealings with government officials.
“My biological mother is Iraq, my adopted mother is Israel,” Mr. Michael told Benny Ziffer, the literary editor of the newspaper Haaretz, in a 2016 interview as part of a tribute to Mr. Michael at Northwestern University. “I belong to both sides. It isn’t difficult for me to go back and say that Iraq, and especially Jewish Iraq, are part of me.”
Mr. Michael wrote a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and a children’s book, winning a barrel of awards and honorary doctorates and carving out a place for himself alongside such world-class Israeli writers as Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua.
He spent six years translating three Arabic novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz into Hebrew.
“Sami Michael changed the face of Israeli literature,” said Lital Levy, an associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. “He wrote in Hebrew about topics and characters that were previously unknown to many readers, or were considered outside the scope of Israeliness: Iraqi-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab Communists, rich and poor Jews in Baghdad, Arabic-speaking Jewish intellectuals.”
She added, in an email: “He gave his characters complexity and depth but also made them relatable and accessible to readers, breaking down cultural walls and stereotypes. He used a trenchant and incisive social realism to expand Israelis’ understanding of the ties that bind Jews and Arabs, both historically and in the present. His popularity among Israeli readers bestowed legitimacy on Mizrahi literature and the world it contained.”
In the interview at Northwestern, Mr. Ziffer said Mr. Michael was the first Israeli writer “to describe Arabs, real Arabs, as they are.” And Professor Berg noted that “even though his characters were flawed people, there was an authorial affection for them.”
While Mizrahim generally skew to the right in Israel’s tumultuous politics, Mr. Michael was unabashedly left-wing and among the first writers and artists in the 1950s to call for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. For two decades, he was president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
A secular and atheistic Jew, he nevertheless praised Judaism in his nonfiction book “Unbounded Ideas” (2000) for being a religion of compassion, grace, benevolence and freedom. But he lamented that “an unbending nationalistic leadership has arisen that struggles tirelessly to recruit the faith for clearly political goals.”
“This marriage has brought corruption of the Jewish religion in Israel,” he said.
Sami Michael was born Kamal Salah in Baghdad on Aug. 15, 1926 to Menashe and Georgia Michael. (Like many Jewish immigrants, he changed his name to one more congenial to Hebrew.) His father, a secular Jew, was a merchant, and his mother managed the household.
He attended Jewish schools, receiving a high school diploma in 1945, but mixed easily with Christians and Muslims, Mr. Michael remembered. Troubled by the authoritarian Iraqi regime and a 1941 pogrom in Baghdad, he joined the Communist underground at the age of 15 and within two years was writing articles for the Iraqi Communist press.
When the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, he fled to Iran and landed in Israel a year later. He settled in an Arabic quarter of Haifa and went to work for Arabic-language editions of a Communist Party newspaper. When reports surfaced of Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union, he quit the party, though he remained a Marxist, and worked as a hydrologist for the Israeli government’s agriculture department, a career that lasted 25 years. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was in his late 40s.
His survivors include his wife, Rachel (Yona) Michael; two children, Dikla and Amir, from his first marriage, to Malka Rivkin; and five grandchildren.
In a yearlong visit to Israel for research on her book, the first study of Mr. Michael’s works, Professor Berg was struck by his popularity with the full spectrum of Israelis. “He’s a writer in the canon that people actually read,” she said. “Because of his humanity and humor, people can relate to his work.”
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