A prophet of wrath loves a man. It was Sammy Michael. He was born in Baghdad and the midwife who was half blind thought he was a girl. “She disconnected me from the umbilical cord, wrapped me in a rag and went up to the roof, where she placed me in the hope that I would die quickly. She thought that she would do my mother a great favor by doing so. Following the intense sobbing, one of the family members went up to the roof, opened the rags and discovered a male genitalia. A great miracle,” he told me in the distant past. But with Michael, as with Michael, no story comes just like that: “From this, I conclude that the hardest words in the prayer are ‘Blessed that I did not marry a woman.'”
Among the writers and creators: the writer Sami Michael passed away at the age of 97
How Kamal Saleh from Baghdad became Sami Michael, one of the most respected writers in Israel
Grandparents, parents and children have grown up on his books since the mid-1970s, including “Equal and More Worth”, “Storm between the Palms”, “Phoun and Dreams”, “Trumpet in the Wadi”, “Love between the Palms”, “Victoria”, “Aida” And so on, alongside reference books, opinion articles and more.
The reality – the one that was imposed on him and the one that he created in his soul, was the roots of his creation. He believed with all his heart that literature is a conversation between a person and himself. Cinema, on the other hand, is the attempt to translate this into a conversation between a person and the masses: “When you meet a literary hero in a movie, it’s actually meeting his mutation. The best book ever written is ‘Anna Karenina’ and of course it was preceded by the Bible. I don’t think human culture would have taken its current form without the ethos and legends of the wonderful story of the Bible, and I’m not talking about it as a religious ritual text but as a novel, as a story.”
“He felt like a stranger”
“In my wildest dreams I never imagined that I would become a Hebrew writer,” he told me when he was 92 years old. “I arrived in Israel about 70 years ago and to this very day I feel like a stranger in the spiritual reality that dominates the country. The religious atmosphere and extreme nationalism together with public corruption instill in me a sense of strangeness.
We grew up in Baghdad three idealistic boys and we dreamed of an enlightened and humane society. My friend Shaul Twig was killed by a policeman’s bullet in one of the demonstrations we organized against the rotten government, and my clothes were soaked with his blood, and my friend Sasson Dalal was put on the gallows after horrific torture. These are my creative roots. The teachers of the three of us were giant writers and thinkers who aspired to live in a world where humanism is a supreme value. Both the Bible and the Koran are great books, written in ancient and dark days in a fascinating humanistic spirit. To my dismay, both have become here a tool of division and killing.”
When asked who most influenced his writing and who are his favorite writers and if there are any young Israeli writers among them, he replied: “Arabic literature, similar to Hebrew literature, was mainly a literature of poetry in my youth. Personally, I have always been drawn to prose, and especially I loved the novel that has spread its wings in the last 200 years. My reading language was English, and my favorite authors are the Russian, British and French literary wizards who touched the heartstrings and preached universal humanism.
Unfortunately, I cannot say this about the Israeli writers alone above the writer S. will be careful I feel that most of the writers in Israel are passionate about nationalism. Sometimes I wonder who leads whom: the government, any government, or the writers who volunteer to serve it. It is sad that senior writers in Israel have two faces: a fake face of a humanist left abroad and a real face in Israel that manifests itself in a secret close connection to the government that supports the settlement and is plotting to bring destruction to democracy. Another disturbing trend in literature is that quite a few young writers, to their dismay, walk away after a disaster named Writing workshops. Imagine if Dostoevsky or Hemingway had started their careers in a workshop run by a writer who managed to publish a bestseller.”
Sami Michael in his youth (Photo: Shmuel Rahmani)
“Living life into a book”
His worldview throughout the last decades of his life did not change at all. He also made sure to write his books by hand over many decades. “Computers show us, those who write by hand, how illiterate we are,” he told me.
Every meeting with him has rare pearls. For example, he said about women: “When God found that Adam was not the glory of his creation, he wanted to improve, and created women”; about life: “I translate life into a book. Those who commit suicide, Palestinian or not, are the ones who pick up an interesting book and instead of reading it until The end, chapter by chapter, they eagerly read only the last line”; And about the life below life: “Demons are the thing that terrifies me the most. I am not afraid of humans but I am deathly afraid of demons. If I am on the Lebanese border at night, I will wish that the figure coming in front of me is a Hezbollah fighter and not a demon.”
He also said that “the English culture of the Middle Ages was a competition of swelling in the king’s court. The bombing of Iraq looks the same to me – America is going to perform the same orchestra. I don’t think you can decide things out of thin air,” and: “I grew up in Iraq and I didn’t know there were two types of Jews. The story of ‘Ashkenazim-Spadim’ is an Ashkenazi Israeli invention that in order to distinguish itself it invented the Mizrahim.”
About old age and death he said that “old age is watching a movie for the 50th time. I would like to have my last meal alone, with myself. I don’t like riots, and I think the act of eating is a very intimate act. Therefore, when I go to meet the angel of death I will do so briefly.”
About Judaism and Israeliness he said: “Jews are masochistic people. They always declare that they are such and accept the judgment of the anti-Semites throughout history. It is a form of pride, spiritual snobbery and a sense of racial uniqueness. When you live longer you realize that everything is possible in human reality. If a nation has given the world philosophers, creators of spectacular music and writers like Goethe, if such a cultured nation produces soaps and purses from the corpses of its victims, then no nation is immune from such barbaric deterioration. We are not immune either.
I cannot ignore the fact that today we are the last ‘power’ in the world that conquers another country in order to settle in it. If we continue this way we will reach the bottom of the ladder. Nevertheless, I am still optimistic because I know that Israeli society is hard-working, original and educated and capable of extricating itself from horrific disasters, and equally knows how to save itself from false victories. Who is an Israeli? Every person who declares that this is his country and that this is the natural place where he wants to grow and prosper until the end of his days. We have a hardworking people and I don’t know how they allow a gang of robbers and thieves to rule over them. I do not understand how he allows corrupt people who are willing to sell the good of the country for the sake of money and personal achievements to govern it. A previous defense minister claimed that hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in the United States today. It is possible that many are gifted with a highly developed sense of smell that brings them to emigrate from here.”
