Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-0-355-43545-0
Ph.D.
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Brandeis University
2017
Born in Baghdad, Shimon Ballas (1930) and Sami Michael (1926) came to Israel as young men in 1951 and 1949 respectively. They began their literary careers writing in Arabic in Iraq and continued writing in Arabic in Israel until later making a transition to Hebrew. Today, Ballas and Michael are known popularly as Israeli-Hebrew writers and have published several novels since the 1960s. Both were members of the Communist party in Iraq in the 1940s and then later in Israel during the 1950s, and these intellectual roots play a formative role in their novels and stories, as does the fact that they emerged from the context of 1940s Baghdad. As authors who wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew, their literary work gives expression to Arab-Jewish subjectivity as a diverse, cacophonous, and contested site where political ideology and aesthetics meet.