My Michael (Hebrew: Mikha’el Sheli) was published by Am Oved in 1968 and became the bestselling Israeli novel of its era. Hannah Gonen narrates her marriage to Michael, a gentle, methodical geology student she meets in Jerusalem in the early 1950s. They marry, have a son, and settle into a life of quiet domestic routine in a small apartment. Michael studies for his doctorate, teaches, becomes a lecturer. Hannah — intelligent, restless, imaginative — feels herself slowly suffocating.
The novel’s power derives from the gap between what happens (very little — this is a novel of domestic life in which the events are meals, conversations, a child’s illness, a husband’s promotion) and what Hannah feels (enormous, turbulent, suppressed). Her inner life is dominated by erotic fantasies involving two Arab boys she knew as a child in mandatory Palestine — twin brothers named Halil and Aziz who appear in her daydreams as figures of desire, danger, and violence. In her fantasies, the twins carry out acts of destruction and sexual aggression that represent everything her actual life denies her.
Oz uses the divided city of Jerusalem — split between Israel and Jordan from 1948 to 1967, with no man’s land running through its center — as the novel’s controlling metaphor. Hannah is divided like the city: her public self is a dutiful wife and mother; her private self is a landscape of desire and rage. The Arab twins who populate her fantasies live on the other side of the border — the forbidden, inaccessible territory that is simultaneously threatening and seductive. The novel was read on publication as both a feminist text (a woman’s protest against the narrowness of her domestic role) and a political allegory (Israel’s unresolved relationship with the Palestinian other).
Collecting My Michael
First Hebrew edition (Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1968): Hardcover.
First English edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1972): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed: $150–$400