Sami Michael

Michael was born in Baghdad in 1926 into a Jewish family and attended Jewish schools.[1] His childhood neighborhood was shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians, giving him early experience of the religiously diverse urban society that later appeared in his fiction.[3][1] His writing repeatedly returned to the Iraqi Jewish world of the 1930s and 1940s, depicting its traditionalists, secularists, and intellectuals rather than treating the community as a single, uniform social group.[1]

The Farhud pogrom of 1941 became a turning point in his political development.[1] At about fifteen, in the context of the pogrom and the rise of a pro-Nazi regime in Iraq, he joined the Iraqi Communist underground.[3] He later explained his decision in terms of both Jewish identity and Iraqi patriotism: he believed Communism offered a route toward a liberal Iraqi society in which Jews could advance.[1] His early political commitment therefore combined concern for Jewish security with hopes for the transformation of the country in which he had grown up.[1]

An arrest warrant issued in 1948 because of his political activity forced Michael to leave Iraq.[2] His father arranged for him to be smuggled across the border into Iran, where he changed his name.[2] As conditions for Iraqi Jews deteriorated, he sought a more permanent refuge and, with help from the Jewish Agency in Tehran, arrived in Israel in April 1949.[1] Fear of possible extradition to Iraq contributed to his departure from Iran.[2]

Michael chose Israel despite an offer from the Communist Party to resettle him in the Soviet Union.[2] One account of his journey recounts that passengers on his flight were told their destination was Paris, but that the aircraft landed at Haifa airport.[4] He initially lived in Jaffa before moving to Haifa, the city that became central to his journalism and to several of his fictional settings.[2]

Michael’s move from Jaffa to Haifa followed an invitation from the writer Emil Habibi to join the editorial staff of the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Ittihad.[2] He had sent the newspaper two articles whose publication prompted reactions, encouraging Habibi to propose a closer working relationship.[2] Michael subsequently wrote for both Al-Ittihad and Al-Jadid, and used the pen name Samir Mard for a regular column.[2] His earliest literary activity in Israel included Arabic prose, stories, and newspaper articles.[1][5]

He served in the Israel Defense Forces from 1950 to 1952.[1] As an itinerant newspaper correspondent during the state’s early years, he reported on immigrants living in transit camps and on Arabs in villages subject to Israeli military rule.[1] These assignments brought him into contact with two populations that would remain prominent in his fiction: newcomers struggling to find a place in Israeli society and Arab citizens negotiating their position within the state.[1]

In 1955 Michael left the Communist Party after learning details of Stalin’s rule and atrocities.[1][5] He also declined to take a Mapai membership card and found employment in the Hydrological Service of the Ministry of Agriculture.[5] His professional life outside literature continued for decades; one account dates his work as a hydrologist from 1955 to 1982.[1] During this period he studied hydrology, psychology, and Arabic literature.[1]

Between 1955 and 1970 Michael passed through a fifteen-year period of literary silence.[1] When he resumed writing in the early 1970s, he did so in Hebrew rather than Arabic.[1] He later connected this linguistic change to an intimate transformation in his relationship with the language, explaining that he began writing in Hebrew only when he began to dream in Hebrew.[5] His working experience in the Hydrological Service also entered his literary work, inspiring the 2001 book Water Touching Water, or Mayim Noshkim le-Mayim.[3]

Michael’s identification with Israel developed through personal attachment rather than through a simple replacement of his Iraqi identity.[1] He regarded himself as an heir to Babylonian Jewish culture and described his Israeli patriotism in terms of affection for the country and its human surroundings.[1] Reflecting on his arrival, he said it had not been love at first sight: his children’s birth in Israel helped him decide that their homeland would also be his own.[5]

His civic involvement eventually included party politics and sustained organizational leadership.[2] He appeared on Meretz’s Knesset lists in 1992 and 1996 and was elected president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in 2001.[2] He held the presidency until September 2023, after more than two decades in the role, and subsequently became the association’s honorary president.[3] During his presidency he participated in dozens of its events and used public speeches to identify injustices and call for change.[3]

Michael published his first Hebrew novel, Shavim ve-Shavim Yoter, in 1974; its English title appears in several forms, including All Men Are Equal, but Some Are More So and Equal and More Equal.[1][2] The novel concerned Middle Eastern and North African immigrants in Israeli transit camps during the 1950s, including an Iraqi immigrant family struggling to integrate into the surrounding society.[2][6] It addressed the treatment of camp residents and the inequalities separating newcomers from more established groups.[7]

The title became a common expression for social inequality both among Jews of different backgrounds and between Jews and Arabs.[2] The novel also established concerns that recurred throughout Michael’s work: the immigrant’s encounter with veteran Israelis, competing expectations of Israeliness, and the distance between formal belonging and everyday social acceptance.[1] His Arabic-speaking immigrant characters frequently confronted more than one possible model of what becoming Israeli should mean.[1]

Michael’s first children’s book, published in 1975, was Storm Among the Palms, also rendered as A Storm Between the Palms.[2][3] It concerned Jewish children in Iraq during World War II and extended his exploration of Iraqi Jewish life to younger readers.[2] Other works associated with his portrayals of Baghdad included A Handful of Fog in 1979, Love Among the Palms in 1990, and Victoria.[1] Across these books, the Jewish community appeared as internally varied, with differences of outlook, education, religious practice, and social position.[1]

Michael’s 1977 novel Hasut—also rendered as Patronage and published in English as Refuge in 1988—depicted Jewish and Arab left-wing workers during the Yom Kippur War.[2][8] Set in Haifa, it centered on a left-wing organization and on Shula, a Communist activist and mother of a child with special needs, whose husband was away at war.[5] The organization asked her to shelter Fathi, an Arab poet and fellow communist, bringing attraction, reluctance, opposing ideological commitments, and moral and sexual tensions into the household.[5][8] Relationships among Jews, Arabs, and Arab-Jews formed a central part of the novel’s social landscape.[9]

Michael’s 1987 novel A Trumpet in the Wadi drew on Wadi Nisnas, the mixed Haifa neighborhood where he lived.[2] Its central relationship joined Huda, an Arab Christian woman, and Alex, a Jewish immigrant, on the eve of the First Lebanon War.[5] Both were socially marginal figures, and their love crossed the Jewish-Arab boundary while remaining exposed to the demands of the surrounding society.[5][9] In one scene, after Alex was called up to fight, Huda ironed his uniform on the night before his departure.[5]

The novel reached readers beyond its original Hebrew publication through translation.[10] An English-language edition translated by Yael Lotan was published in New York by Simon & Schuster around 2003.[10] The book also enjoyed a substantial readership in Israel, selling more than 100,000 copies.[11] Its movement between the neighborhood, the couple, and the wider conflict made Haifa’s mixed social world a particularly visible setting within Michael’s body of work.[2][5]

Victoria appeared in Hebrew in 1993 and in English in 1995.[1] Along with A Handful of Fog and the books set among Iraqi Jewish children, it belonged to Michael’s sustained literary return to Baghdad.[1] These narratives preserved a social world containing traditionalists, secular Jews, and intellectuals, while his Hebrew prose carried Arabic and Judeo-Arabic sayings and customs into its language.[1] His use of Hebrew thus retained important elements of the cultural environment in which he had grown up.[1]

Michael also wrote youth novels, novellas, plays, and collections of interviews.[1][6] Titles across this broader output included Tin Shacks and Dreams in 1979, Demons in the Basement in 1983, Twins in 1988, and Brown Devils in 1993.[1] Later lists of his works also included Pigeons in Trafalgar.[3] His literary work was therefore not confined to adult novels, even though the social and family novel remained central to his reputation.[1][12]

The outsider was a recurring figure in Michael’s fiction: immigrants confronted veteran Israelis, Israeli Arabs faced hostility, and women struggled within patriarchal family and communal structures.[1] Arabic-speaking immigrants, including Jews whose language and cultural background connected them to the broader Middle East, recurred throughout his work.[1] Their stories brought Mizrahi Jewish experience into sustained contact with questions of Israeli identity and Jewish-Arab relations.[1][9]

Michael’s writing formed part of the emergence of Mizrahi literature by Jews from Arab lands.[9] Its socially attentive perspective also belonged to a wider literary shift toward ethnic communities and minorities previously situated at the margins of Israeli culture.[1] His novels did not restrict these concerns to an abstract account of inequality: they explored them through immigrant families, mixed neighborhoods, strained households, romantic attachments, and conflicts between personal obligations and political commitments.[1][5]

His family novels employed the realist social novel to explore existential and identity conflicts among varied characters in Iraq and Israel.[12] European and American novels were among the literary traditions on which he drew.[12] At the same time, the old world of Iraqi Jewish life remained an important presence in his narratives and in the formation of his communist beliefs.[12] The combination of family narrative, social conflict, and remembered Iraqi settings distinguished his work within Hebrew literature.[12]

Michael expressed the relationship between his backgrounds in a statement about dual belonging: “I am Iraqi and I am also Israeli. These two identities exist in me and I love them both because they are a part of me. Both these rivers flow into my work.”[8] His treatment of Baghdad and Haifa gave narrative form to that connection, with Iraqi Jewish memories remaining active alongside the experience of immigration and life in Israel.[1][2]

His work also connected Arabic and Hebrew through translation.[1] He translated Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy into Hebrew, while his own books were translated into multiple languages, including Arabic.[1] He belonged to a generation of Iraqi writers who continued publishing in Arabic and Hebrew after immigration to Israel.[13] Translation, the movement between languages, and the retention of Arabic expressions within Hebrew prose were therefore all present in his literary career.[1][13]

After Israel and Egypt signed their peace agreement, Michael was among the first Israeli authors invited to lecture in Cairo.[6] His activity as a translator and visiting author accompanied a fictional interest in relationships that crossed communal and linguistic boundaries.[1][6] Those relationships were not presented as free of conflict: Refuge brought together Jews, Arabs, and Arab-Jews, while A Trumpet in the Wadi placed an intimate relationship across the Jewish-Arab divide.[9]

Michael’s books became popular in Israel, and many entered high-school curricula.[6] A Trumpet in the Wadi, Storm Among the Palms, and A Handful of Fog were among the works that found readers in Israel and abroad.[11] His books circulated in multiple languages, allowing narratives rooted in Baghdad, immigrant life, and Haifa to reach audiences beyond Hebrew readers.[1][11]

Adaptation extended that readership into theater, film, and music.[2][14] A Trumpet in the Wadi became a stage play in 1988 and a film in 2001.[2] The film was directed by Lina and Slava Chaplin and won the Haifa International Film Festival’s best feature film award.[2][5] Victoria also supplied the basis for the chamber opera Victoria and the Men, with a libretto by Roni Keinan and music by Tzipi Fleischer.[14] Scores and manuscript material associated with the opera survive among cataloged materials relating to Michael.[14]

His honors included the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works in 1981 and the Agnon Prize in 2018.[2] He also received the Prix WIZO for Victoria, the Ze’ev Prize, an ACUM Award, and an IBBY Award in Berlin.[8] Additional awards listed for his career include the EMET Prize in 2007, the Brenner Prize in 2008, and a Hans Christian Andersen distinction associated with Storm Among the Palms in 1992.[4]

Academic institutions recognized his contribution to Hebrew literature through honorary doctorates.[8] Ben-Gurion University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2000, and institutions listed among those honoring him also included the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, and the College of Management.[8][4] Haifa granted him the Key to the City in 2002, acknowledging a writer whose work repeatedly drew on the city’s neighborhoods and relationships.[2]

Michael’s literary legacy also includes recorded testimony and continuing scholarly attention.[14][12] An oral-history interview is included among the materials associated with him in library collections.[14] A peer-reviewed chapter published by Cambridge University Press in 2025 examined his social novels, their realist form, their engagement with European and American fiction, and the Iraqi Jewish world reflected in their narratives.[12]

Michael died on April 1, 2024, at age ninety-seven.[2][6] He was survived by his second wife, the journalist Rachel Yona Michael, and two children from his first marriage, Amir and Dikla.[3][6] His public career joined the roles of novelist, Arabic-language journalist, translator, hydrologist, and civil-rights advocate, while his writing maintained connections between Iraqi Jewish memory and Israeli cultural life.[1][2]

Michael publicly criticized religious extremism and prejudices he identified in Israel’s original Ashkenazi establishment against both Middle Eastern and North African Jews and Arabs.[2] His longtime editor Yigal Schwartz also described Michael’s writing and public activity as repeatedly centering people disadvantaged by social and political conditions, including Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the territories.[7] Michael’s attachment to Israel was emotional rather than ideological, and he regarded Diaspora existence as a valid form of Jewish life.[1] These positions coexisted with his identification as an Israeli patriot and heir to Babylonian Jewish culture.[1]

Critical disagreement also concerned the political analogy and portrayal of Arabs in Refuge.[8] In a retrospective literary essay, his longtime editor Yigal Schwartz interpreted Michael’s first novel as a literary extension of the Black Panthers’ social protest and argued that his fiction combined political conflict with psychological complexity.[7] Schwartz also argued that recognition from the literary establishment came late, citing the absence of Michael’s works from Hebrew University reading lists in the late 1970s and 1980s and noting that he never received the Israel Prize.[7]