My Michael made Amos Oz a leader of Hebrew fiction

Person: Amos Oz
Lived: 1939–2018
Field: Novelist and essayist
From: Israeli

The story

In the mid-1960s Amos Oz was a young member of Kibbutz Hulda, teaching in its high school and allowed just one day a week to write. His first books, the story collection Where the Jackals Howl (1965) and the kibbutz novel Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966), were well received. His second novel he wrote largely at night, sitting in the bathroom of the family's small flat with the manuscript on his knees while his wife and daughters slept. He finished it in May 1967, weeks before the Six-Day War.

My Michael, published in 1968, is narrated by Hannah, a young literature student in 1950s Jerusalem who marries Michael Gonen, a calm, methodical geology student. As her marriage settles into routine, she escapes into an inner world of fantasy, longing and fear, including dreams about two Arab twins she played with as a child. Oz used the stone houses and narrow alleys of the divided city, and the tensions of the years before the 1956 Sinai campaign, to mirror her inner state.

The novel was the best-selling book in Israel in the 1968–69 season, selling nearly 40,000 copies in its first 18 months. It was also controversial. Some critics called it politically dangerous because of its portrayal of Arab-Jewish tension and its bleak view of the Zionist ideal of the confident new Israeli. Oz donated the royalties to his kibbutz, which then gave him an extra day a week to write.

The book established Oz as a leading figure of the Israeli New Wave of the 1960s, alongside writers such as A. B. Yehoshua, Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Aharon Appelfeld, who turned from collective, heroic narratives towards the private lives of individuals.

My Michael appeared in English in 1972 in a translation by Nicholas de Lange, the first of sixteen Oz books he would translate. It has since been published in more than 30 languages, including Arabic, and was filmed in Hebrew in 1974. In 1999 the German publisher Bertelsmann named it one of the 100 great novels of the twentieth century, and it remains one of the most studied works of modern Hebrew fiction.