The Possibilities of an Arab-Jewish Poetics: A Study of the Arabic and Hebrew Fiction of Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael

Born in Baghdad, Shimon Ballas (1930) and Sami Michael (1926) came to Israel as young men in 1951 and 1949 respectively. They began their literary careers writing in Arabic in Iraq and continued writing in Arabic in Israel until later making a transition to Hebrew. Today, Ballas and Michael are known popularly as Israeli-Hebrew writers and have published several novels since the 1960s. Both were members of the Communist party in Iraq in the 1940s and then later in Israel during the 1950s, and these intellectual roots play a formative role in their novels and stories, as does the fact that they emerged from the context of 1940s Baghdad. As authors who wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew, their literary work gives expression to Arab-Jewish subjectivity as a diverse, cacophonous, and contested site where political ideology and aesthetics meet.;This dissertation seeks to focus on the split yet translingual literary worlds of Ballas and Michael as Arabic-Hebrew and Arab-Jewish writers. Considering their Arabic and Hebrew works as part of the same textual continuum not only illuminates a brief, though important moment in Modern Hebrew writing, it also has substantial implications for understanding the cultural, linguistic, and poetic elements that constitute the Israeli literary landscape. I argue that the Arabic-Hebrew linguistic transition is reflected in the way the self is imagined and represented in Ballas' and Michael's work. The passage from the native Arabic to the adopted Hebrew involved alienation, dissolution, and silence; it also opened up possibilities for imagining new kinds of selves in Hebrew writing.;This dissertation begins by examining Ballas' and Michael's early Arabic short stories from al-Jadid, the Communist Party's monthly publication. It then traces the way these two authors construct various forms of Arab-Jewish subjectivity as they make the transition to writing in Hebrew, arguing that the process of language transition was never complete, but rather continued to structure their texts and determine characters and narrative events. I focus on Ballas' and Michael's early Hebrew novels as the genesis of a complex, Arab-Jewish subjectivity in post-1948 Israeli literature that both suggested possibilities for the future even as it was marked by the limits of social and political discourse.