Sami Michael, Iraqi-Israeli author who bridged divides, dies at 97

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a watchdog group where he was president, announced the death but did not provide a cause. Writers, activists and political leaders across Israel in shared tribute amid the divisions and turmoil of the Gaza war.

Writing in his adopted language of Hebrew, Mr. Michael (pronounced me-KA-ale) became a literary voice of the “other” in the Middle East — whether within the ancient Jewish communities in Muslim nations or among the Jewish émigrés to Israel from nations such as Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.

The stories created by Mr. Michael over more than a dozen books were fictional, but they illuminated familiar realities. His Arab Jewish characters confront discrimination and indignities big and small. They also grapple with the weight of history and politics, including Israel’s past wars against Arab states and the occupation of Palestinian territories for generations.

For many non-Arab readers, Mr. Michael’s novels offered a starkly different version of the Israeli experience, as seen through Arab Jewish immigrants known in Hebrew as Mizrahim, or Easterners.

Mr. Michael’s first novel in Hebrew, “All Men Are Equal — But Some Are More” in 1974, loosely borrows its title from George Orwell’s political allegory “Animal Farm” and chronicles members of a middle-class Jewish family from Baghdad as they seek their bearings in Israel in the 1950s and beyond.

The family arrives dressed in their “best garments, tailor-made of expensive English wool and pure silk,” Mr. Michael wrote in the book, whose title in English translation can be “Equal and More Equal.” They expected the same enthusiastic welcome given to immigrants of European heritage. Instead, the family was placed with other Arab Jewish newcomers in a squalid transit camp.

“[A] gray bunch of pasty-faced bureaucrats appeared … in five short minutes the new homeland turned my father from an energetic man in the prime of his life to an old broken abject fool,” he wrote.

Mr. Michael’s work became regarded as essential reading in understanding the tightly knit Arab-Jewish communities and placed him among some of the most celebrated Israeli writers, along with Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Meir Shalev. Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Mr. Michael a “giant among giants.”

“Sometimes I feel that there are two identities inside me,” Mr. Michael once said. “The one is of an Arab from Iraq, while the other one is of an Israeli Jew.”

Mr. Michael, then known as Kamal Salah, fled Baghdad in 1948 after the establishment of Israel, which was immediately locked in conflict with Arab states. Mr. Michael, who was also a Communist Party activist, said he feared arrest and possible execution in Iraq. He spent a year in Iran before leaving for Israel.

He settled in Haifa and wrote articles for Arabic-language editions of a Communist Party newspaper. He quit the party after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a 1956 speech acknowledged the brutal purges and repression of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, but Mr. Michael remained active in left-wing politics. Meanwhile, he was hired as a hydrologist in Israeli agriculture department; it was a position he held until 1974, and he put his writing on hold as he mastered Hebrew.

Nearly all his novels carry some autobiographical echoes. In “Refuge” (1977), set in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the 1973 October War, the characters include a Jewish asylum seeker from Iraq who becomes demoralized by his second-class status in Israel.

“A Handful of Fog” (1979) follows the devastation of Iraq’s once-flourishing Jewish community, and “Victoria” (1995) is based on observations of his mother’s life in Baghdad’s Jewish quarter and the dominance of men over the community’s affairs. The book ends in Israel, where the Iraqi immigrant men have lost their power and the women more easily adjust.

His 2003 novel “A Trumpet in the Wadi” explores prejudice through a romance between a Christian Arab woman and a Russian Jewish immigrant in Israel. In a review of the novel, renowned Israeli writer David Grossman said Mr. Michael possessed a powerful ability to break down “us and them” stereotypes.

“My biological mother is Iraq, my adopted mother is Israel,” Mr. Michael said at a 2015 literary event at Northwestern University. “I belong to both sides.”

Politically, he found fault on many fronts. He decried anti-Israel rhetoric of Arab leaders. Yet he also was a longtime supporter of Palestinian statehood and was increasingly bitter over hard-line Israeli policies he asserted had eroded the nation’s soul.

“Racism is gradually becoming entrenched in Israeli society with the political strengthening of the religious right,” he said in a 2012 speech in Haifa. “Racism is directed at Jews from Arab and Islamic countries, immigrants from Ethiopia and Russia, Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied territories, refugees and working migrants, gays, and the list goes on.”

In September 2023, a month before the Hamas attacks on Israel that began the war in Gaza, Mr. Michael stepped down after two decades as president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. “He expressed his pain and rage toward the injustices in Israel, demanded where justice must be served and instilled in us a spirit of hope for change,” the organization said in a statement.

Kamal Salah was born in Baghdad on Aug. 15, 1926. His father was a merchant and trader; his mother was a homemaker. He changed his name to Sami Michael after arriving in Israel.

He said he became aware of the power of literature as a boy during the crushing heat of a Baghdad summer. He began reading Jack London books set in the Arctic. “As I read the book, I shivered from the cold. I said, ‘Ahh, this is a magic man.’ Something happened to me while reading his work,” he recalled. “I wanted to be a writer.”

In Baghdad, he attended Jewish schools and, as a teenager, joined the Communist Party that opposed Iraq’s increasingly nationalist government. In June 1941, Muslim mobs attacked Jewish areas of Baghdad, killing scores of people and burning homes and shops.

He came to Israel amid a wave of Arab Jewish immigrants who felt persecuted in their homelands. Mr. Michael said he chose to write in Hebrew out of a need to reach readers — even though it took him decades to feel comfortable with turning the language into prose.

“I didn’t have any lessons in the Hebrew language. It entered my body through my skin. I was caught by the musicality of the language. I created my own Hebrew,” he said. “I was 48 when I started writing in Hebrew, and I used every cell of my body to write to the Israeli reader.”

In addition to his novels, he wrote several nonfiction books, plays and children’s books, including “Storm Among the Palms” (1991), and received the 1992 Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature. He translated into Hebrew the Cairo trilogy — “Palace Walk,” “Palace of Desire” and “Sugar Street” — of the Nobel laureate Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.

Survivors include his wife, the former Rachel Yonah; two children from his first marriage to Malka Rivkin; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Michael, the former hydrologist, was fond of using water metaphors to describe his life and work.

“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,” he once said in a roundtable discussion with other writers. “Both these rivers flow into my work.”