Novel · A way to begin
My Michael
מיכאל שלי
Amos Oz · 1968
Synopsis
In the Jerusalem of the 1950s, Hannah Greenbaum, a literature student, stumbles on the steps of Terra Sancta, where the university has withdrawn, and Michael Gonen, a geology student, steadies her. They marry; she gives up her studies, works in a kindergarten and settles with him in an old dark apartment in Mekor Baruch. Michael is steady, practical, without imagination. Hannah, a prisoner of her daydreams, finds again in dreams the Arab twins of her childhood, Halil and Aziz, Captain Nemo and Michel Strogoff, and drifts away from a husband who does not understand her.
Context
Oz began the book at the age of twenty-four at kibbutz Hulda, where he divided the week between teaching and the fields, and wrote it at night over a year and a half. Sifriyat Poalim rejected the manuscript; Am Oved published it in April 1968 in its Sifriya la-Am series, and it sold nearly forty thousand copies in eighteen months. Part of the critics judged it politically dangerous. Oz refused to have it read in the light of the 1967 war, the book having been written before it, and rejected the idea that Hannah was a portrait of his mother. Dan Wolman made a film from it in 1974.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages in French, with no action. It is better to know that Jerusalem was cut in two from 1948 to 1967.
Prizes and reception
The best-selling Israeli novel in 1968 and 1969, translated into more than thirty languages; counted in 1999 by Bertelsmann among the hundred great novels of the twentieth century.