Refuge: A Novel - Hardcover

Michael, Sami

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0827603088 ISBN 13: 9780827603080

Publisher: JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY, 1988

Synopsis

In the surprising world that Sami Michael reveals, Shula, an Ashkenazic Jew, is the center of a web of brilliantly drawn characters: Israeli Arabs, Palestinian refugees, “black Jews,” and “white Jews.” Swirling in and out of Shula’s story are poignantly drawn minor players - an Arab/Israeli couple, their ever-more-militant son, a seductive Arab poet, and political outsiders in a fragile society at war. Sami Michael was born in Baghdad in 1926, fled to Iran during WWII, and eventually made his way to Israel. His first novel, Equal and More Equal was published to critical acclaim. Refuge was his second major work, written originally in Hebrew but, he adds, “with the emotional baggage of the Third World.”

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Although it suffers from lapses into artless, abrupt and even bombastic prose, this work has considerable merit and interest as a social document. Michael fled his native Iraq to escape hanging as a leftist during WW II; after 25 years as a field worker in Israel, he began to publish fiction. Refuge , which follows Equal and More Equal , chronicles the activities of various Jewish and Arab members of Israel's Communist Party during the first days of the 1973 war. Marduch, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant and Zionist by default, enters combat to repay a debt to the country that gave him refuge. His wife Shula is left to cope with their retarded son, with her feelings for a former lover and career officer who is lost in battle and with an Arab comrade seeking sanctuary in her home from the Israelis. Michael trains his gaze on Israeli Communists, who are seldom scrutinized in fiction, to reveal a party struggling with hypocrisy and rife with anti-Semitic Arabs and Arab-hating Jews, misogynists and conformists.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0827603088
• ISBN 13: 9780827603080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382