friend who constantly asks him to help her write her papers. The novel ends with Hannah still married, but for all intents and purposes estranged from Michael. Themes The relationship between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem and Israel lends an undercurrent of fear and mistrust to the story. While the Arab-Israeli political situation is not discussed overtly, the setting of the novel in the early 1950s indicates that Israel had recently fought for its existence against armies from Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the country continued to be targeted by "small-scale Palestinian infiltrations – supported by the Arab states – into Israeli territory" between 1949 and 1956. Wells and Loy write: "The novel uses 1950s Jerusalem as a metaphor for Israel itself, portraying the community as it then was – a mostly besieged enclave in an ever-threatening wilderness". Ehud Ben-Ezer explains that post-independence, Israeli fiction like My Michael portrayed Arabs as an existential threat. The Arab twins who metamorphose in Hannah's imagination from childhood playmates into deadly terrorists are not the cause for her suffering, he explains, but a metaphor for it. Amos Elon also notes this undercurrent of Arab-Jewish tension. Jerusalem in the 1950s, when the story takes place, was a city partitioned into Jewish and Arab sectors by the 1949 Armistice border. Beneath the monotony of Hannah's life lies the insecurity of living in "a city divided, its 'Europeanized' Israeli sector surrounded on three sides by an ever-present menace, the deadly hostile Arab natives". Elon adds that Oz finished writing the novel in May 1967, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Six-Day War which resulted in the Israeli annexation of Arab East Jerusalem. Elon observes that the reunification of Jerusalem did nothing to unify its Arab and Jewish citizenry, saying: "an invisible line continues to divide the two sectors, and will likely do so for a long time to come". The 1956 Sinai campaign also figures in the plot, with Michael being called up for duty and Hannah remaining alone with their child on the home front. Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked has noted that Hannah's nervous breakdown, coming just as Israel is preparing for war, "corresponds to the [factual] Sinai Campaign, which was perceived as discharging tensions that had built up from years of living on the edge". Oz further employs the architectural landscape of Jerusalem – its