Sami Michael, 97, Israeli novelist with Arabic roots

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and the prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died Monday in Haifa, the mixed Jewish-Arab city in Israel where he lived. He was 97.

His wife, Rachel Michael, confirmed his death.

Like many exiles, Mr. Michael had one foot planted in the country where he settled and the other in the country he left behind. He fled Iraq in 1948 after the outbreak of war between the newly formed nation of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Iraq among them. As a Jew and a communist activist, he had been threatened with prison and execution in Iraq.

In Israel, he said, he found that as a 23-year-old refugee from the Middle East, he was looked down upon and treated like a second-class citizen by Jews of European origin.

“When he came to Israel, he wasn’t seen as equal to the European immigrants, and he had to fight against that,” said Nancy E. Berg, a professor of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael” (2004). “That led him to the kinds of things he writes about in his books.”

A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew, and when he did, he published his first novel in 1974, with the title “All Men Are Equal — But Some Are More,” a variation on a quotation from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” (The title has also been rendered in English as “Equal and More Equal.”)

The book is set in the squalid transit camps that housed immigrants, known in Hebrew as Mizrahim, or Easterners, who had escaped persecution in Arabic countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The protagonist, David, a child of those camps, performs valiantly in the Israeli-Arab War of 1967 but learns that his heroism and professional expertise do not insulate him against discrimination.

In the novel “Refuge” (1977), an Iraqi-Jewish character is grateful to Israel for giving him asylum after years in an Iraqi prison, but he is disillusioned by the difference in economic and social status between the Mizrahim and European Jews.

Mr. Michael went on to write “A Handful of Fog” (1979), which is set in the 2,500-yearold community of Babylonian Jews in Iraq.

In the novel, he depicts the colorful, ethnically diverse life that flourished there in the 1930s and ’40s but that later edged toward extinction with the persecutions and expulsions of Jews following Israel’s gaining independence in 1948.

His other novels include “Victoria” (1995), a bestseller in Israel centering on the patriarchal world of a Jewish woman in Baghdad; and “A Trumpet in the Wadi” (2003), which traces the romance between a Christian Arab woman and a Russian Jewish immigrant and touches on the hostility that Israeli Arabs sometimes face in their dealings with government officials.

He also spent six years translating into Hebrew three Arabic novels by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.

“My biological mother is Iraq, my adopted mother is Israel,” Mr. Michael told Benny Ziffer, literary editor of the newspaper Haaretz, in a 2016 interview as part of a tribute to Mr. Michael at Northwestern University. “I belong to both sides. It isn’t difficult for me to go back and say that Iraq, and especially Jewish Iraq, are part of me.”

Mr. Michael wrote a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and a children’s book, winning a barrel of awards and honorary doctorates.