My Michael by Amos Oz

First published:Mikha’el sheli, 1968 (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Jerusalem, Israel

Principal Characters:

• Hannah Gonen, the narrator of the novel, whose journal entries reveal the disintegration of her inner world
• Michael Gonen, Hannah’s geologist husband, whose ineffectuality as husband and father lead Hannah to despair
• Yair Gonen, Hannah and Michael’s precocious, sometimes insolent son
• Yehezek Gonen, Michael’s brooding, depressed father

The Novel

My Michael begins as an epistolary novel set in Jerusalem in the 1950’s, a place and time which constituted, as Amos Oz has said, “a Jewish anticlimax after the tragedies and achievements of the forties.” The novel consists of the journal entries of Hannah Gonen, a despairing Israeli housewife retracing the important events and aspirations of her young life. From the beginning, she tells the reader mysteriously that she is keeping her record specifically “because people I loved have died...because when I was young I was full of the power of loving, and now that power of loving is dying. I do not want to die.” Her power to love and to live becomes inextricably interwoven with her ability to separate dream from reality in her journal, an ability which fails her as the novel moves to its denouement.

What begins as a seemingly straightforward, dispassionate chronology of events soon devolves into an idiosyncratic, often fragmentary account of Hannah’s mental life as she walks through the ruins of her adulthood and her disintegrating marriage. Hannah attempts to forge a coherent pattern to her life. Yet she discovers not only “a sameness in the days and a sameness in me” but also “something which is not the same. I do not know its name.” Hannah begins her attempt at naming this vague discomfort by recording the facts of her marriage to Michael Gonen. Hannah had met Michael, to whom she constantly refers as “my Michael,” by chance, while an undergraduate literature student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His dry, pragmatic pursuit of a Ph.D. in geology contrasts with Hannah’s passionate and lyrical literary tastes. Michael is neither witty nor particularly imaginative, yet Hannah is drawn to his stability and settledness.

Their courtship and eventual wedding are described in precise but ironically unromantic terms as something inevitable, a relationship which neither exactly chose but which seemed somehow appropriate to them. The matter-of-factness and ambivalence with which Hannah recounts these events foreshadow her eventual estrangement from her husband and their mode of life. Hovering over their budding relationship is the brooding, divided city of Jerusalem, whose “villages and suburbs surround it in a close circle like curious bystanders surrounding a wounded woman lying in the road.” Thus, Jerusalem itself emerges in her imagination as a haunting presence and a competing rival for Michael’s attention and devotion.

From the concreteness of this early episode, Hannah’s narrative soon shuttles violently between her inner and outer life; reminiscence, daydream, and the banal details of her “real” existence coalesce, and she is increasingly unable to distinguish between sleeping and waking. She thinks often of her childhood, remembering fondly her bout with diphtheria, which offered “a state of freedom,” a dose of attention from her parents and doctors that gave her a sense of worth. Upon recovering from the illness, she felt “exiled,” and she carried away from her childhood a “vague longing to fall seriously ill.” Her most alarming preoccupation, however, stems from the innocent but problematic relationship she recalls with the twin Arab boys of her adolescence, Halil and Aziz. Her frequent reveries of sexual debasement at their hands temporarily distract her from the empty, unfulfilled life she lives with Michael but underscore her disturbing disengagement from the events of her everyday existence.

As Michael climbs the ladder of moderate academic success, the amiability that has characterized their marriage turns to mere tolerance, precluding true intimacy or friendship. Even the birth of her son, Yair, provides no meaningful entry into a more public world for Hannah; at an early age, Yair becomes enamored of his father and paternal grandfather, Yehezek Gonen, sharing his greatest confidences with them. In one incident, emblematic of their growing mistrust of each other, Michael childishly intimates that she is responsible for the disappearance of a cat he has brought home for Yair. Dishonoring Hannah in front of their obviously spoiled son, Michael implies that Yair may get his way by learning to bully and throw tantrums.

As his career is eclipsed by the discrediting of his geological theories and their money dwindles, Michael becomes a more sulking, insensitive partner. In defense, Hannah submerses herself in her private fears and secret dreams. Disengaged from her past by her father’s death and from the present by Michael’s aloofness, Hannah resigns herself to the death of their marriage (“without touching each other”) and resolves to find her release in sleep. The frenzied climax of the novel finds Hannah in a familiar daydream, her mind drifting to a now grown-up Halil and Aziz, whom she accompanies on a guerrilla mission to disrupt the daily lives of Jerusalem’s population.

The Characters

Oz’s Hannah Gonen is a cultured, intense young woman whose control of her inner and outer life is in question throughout the narrative. While she succumbs to the chaos of her dreamworld toward the end of the novel, her journal’s remarkable evocation of the past and how it has affected her present life is startling in its precision and psychological realism. This is a testimony to Oz’s narrative skill, which in many ways overshadows the minor plot structure of My Michael. Hannah exemplifies Oz’s consistent thematic concern for the fate of the individual consciousness struggling with rather than embracing the political currents of his or her society. His strategy for highlighting the personal crisis of individual protagonists is what some critics have labeled “Magical Realism,” a juxtaposition of everyday, mundane events with fantasy, dream, or startling metaphor. Here Oz uses this device to lay bare Hannah’s psyche, exposing her innermost thoughts and flights of fancy as clues to her disorientation and paranoia.

The reader first becomes aware that Hannah is not merely cataloging daily occurrences when she begins to allude to latent feelings and vague recollections of a distant past without an accompanying context. Memories of childhood begin to surface quite randomly in her narrative, eventually displacing the chronological structure with which the novel begins. Hannah’s pretentiousness about writing in the journal emerges as a running theme: “I have written somewhere in these pages: ‘There is an alchemy in things which is also the inner melody of my life.’ I am inclined to reject this statement now because it is too high-flown.” The more aware she becomes that she is melodramatizing her experiences, the more detached from reality she gets, finally confessing that only fiction can give her life any semblance of order.

Hannah’s Michael emerges as a well-meaning but ineffectual academic, one more at home in scholastic debate and naming prehistoric rocks than in the arms of a loving wife. Her constant reference to him as “my Michael” becomes an ironic counterpoint to their actual relationship. Instead of an affectionate term playfully implying spousal possession, “my Michael” looms as an invective measuring the chasm that has erupted between the two. His surname, Gonen, which means “protector” in Hebrew, is another irony in the novel; while Michael provides all the necessary worldly goods the family needs to survive, he cannot meet Hannah’s spiritual and psychological needs and cannot protect her from herself and the dissolving tension between her dreams and reality.

In the skilled hands of Amos Oz, Jerusalem itself assumes the role of a character, standing in the background as a spiritual fortress guarding many secrets and longings across Arab, Jewish, and Christian cultures. As Jerusalem is a city ostensibly “normal” but divided by hostile camps, so Hannah’s consciousness is a battlefield of unfulfilled ambitions and spousal duties. Implicitly, Hannah’s disengagement from the world at large is as much an escape from the city as it is from her husband. In her dreamy world of shadows, “Jerusalem was far away and could not haunt her” and is transformed as the lost playground for her and the twins. “[T]hrowing hand grenades before dawn among the ravines of the Judean desert...,” they bridge the gulf between the irreconcilable cultures.

Critical Context

Oz’s thematic concerns are quite different from the kind of celebration of Jewish culture often associated with Israeli writers. These better-known themes are reflected, for example, in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israel’s most revered modern writer, who is spiritually attuned to and respectful of the “old ways” and writes expressly to preserve a tradition for later generations. Oz, though writing in Hebrew, is less interested in preserving than in challenging the social and religious mores of modern Israel. For this reason, My Michael, his first novel, written when was he was twenty-eight years old, was an immediate cause celebre in Israel. In a society whose Hebrew-reading public numbers less than a million, My Michael sold a remarkable forty thousand copies. Following Israel’s wild success in the Six Day War, the novel was widely read as an attack on Israel’s new arrogance; Hannah Gonen’s deliberate, undisguised ambivalence toward what Oz conceives as the political imperialism of his countrymen shocked and disturbed many readers.

Oz belongs to the post-independence generation of novelists, whose outlook was significantly shaped by the fact that, unlike their families, they were part of a country they could call their own. Distanced from his parents’ “longing for a return home,” Oz is thus unchained from a borrowed past that might limit or dictate his narrative themes and strategies. Regarding himself as a “secular Zionist” who is not particularly religious, he still embues his characters and settings with the age-old piety of this “holy land.”

This religious temperament resonates in My Michael not only because Oz writes in Hebrew but also because he knows that, no matter how secularized Israel becomes, the ancient religion of the Jews—with all of its ambiguities and tribulations—still haunts the modern Israeli landscape. Oz’s narrative style and focus has helped displace the nostalgia of pre-independence fiction with a problematic, self-questioning mode of writing and has energized political soul-searching in Israel, earning for him a prominent place in international letters as one of Israel’s leading novelists and social critics.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVII (May 21, 1972), p. 5.

Baker, A.T. Review in Time. C (July 3, 1972), p. 63.

Stern, David. “Morality Tale,” in Commonweal. C (July, 1974), pp. 100-101.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Modern Jewish Novel and the City: Franz Kafka, Henry Roth, and Amos Oz,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXIV (1978), pp. 91-104.