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.”
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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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The time is 1973, the setting the Yom Kippur War in Israel. Communist and Zionist, Israeli Arab, Palestinian refugee, and Ashkenazi Jews clash in this story of love and hatred. Marduch, Communist survivor of an Iraqi prison and Zionist by default, has gone to fight for Israelthe country that has given him refuge. When Marduch's wifean Ashkenazi Jew and a faithful party memberis asked to shelter an Arab comrade slated for preventive detention, the anguish of moral, political, and sexual tensions inevitably surface. Who is giving whom refuge? And where does one's loyalty lie, with Israel or with the Arab world? Michael has written a powerful book. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A story of complex identities,
By Ari Weisberg (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Refuge: A Novel (Hardcover)
Sami Michael weaves the intricate and complex plot which is Refuge by introducing the reader to a large number of characters, all of whom have very complex identities. He tells of the Israeli Jew who was born in Iraq, and the Arab with Israeli citizenship who visits his cousins in a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The multiple layers of each of the numerous characters we meet succeed in opening the readers' eyes to the layers of complexity which are Israeli society.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Identity, Eros, and the Arab Israel Conflict,
By Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Refuge: A Novel (Hardcover)
Sami Michael's Refuge is an ambitious novel which attempts to do a great deal in a small amount of space. That Michael largely succeeds is a testimony to his great gifts as a novelist. The main flaw of the book is that Michael has perhaps too many main characters, and this dilutes the thrust of the novel, the momentum, and the reader's ability to respond to the plight of the characters. But on the upside, Michael is able to create a great deal of tension in this novel. He moves fluidly from the Israeli Jewish world, the world of Israeli Arabs, Palestinian Arabs, and every identity in between, and is completely at home in each. He tackles the thorny subject of sexual relations between Israeli Jews and Arabs, making it the fulcrum for his examination of Arab-Jewish relations. Violence, sex, and identity become entwined in interesting and novel ways in Refuge, surprising and even shocking the reader.
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