A Question of Language and Audience: On the Possibility of "Iraqi Novels" in Hebrew

This article focuses on two short novels, Sami Mikhael's Hofen shel Arafel (A handful of fog) and Shimon Balas's Vehu Akher (The other one), written in Hebrew by Israeli writers born in Iraq. Set in Iraq, the two novels are imbued in its reality and history, and the personality at the center strives to belong to Iraq yet often feels rejected by the surrounding society. The question at the center of the article is whether these articles should be considered Israeli or Iraqi? If translated to Arabic, they will be read as Iraqi novels, yet they were published in Hebrew and thus were targeting the Israeli reader, unfamiliar as he is with that reality. For the first time, this article tries to place Mikhael and Balas alongside Iraqi Arab writers, living in Iraq and in exile, and publishing in Arabic and other languages, to examine the interrelations between the writer, his intended audience, his identity, and the language he uses as a tool. This article finds great differences between the two writers and their Iraqi colleagues that shed a new light on various expressions of Iraqiness, experiences of exile, and trends in Israeli literature and intellectual life.