My Michael ( Mikha'el sheli) is a 1968 novel by the Israeli author Amos Oz. The story, told in first-person by a dissatisfied wife, describes her deteriorating marriage to a geology student and her escape into a private fantasy world of violent heroics and sexual encounters. Set in Jerusalem of the 1950s, the novel uses the physical and political landscape of the city as a metaphor for the protagonist's inner struggle. The novel garnered much controversy upon its publication in Israel, and was also the best-selling novel in Israel in the 1968–1969 season. The novel was translated into English in 1972 and has since been translated into more than 30 languages. It was adapted into a Hebrew-language film in 1976. Plot Hannah Greenbaum, a first-year literature student, meets Michael Gonen, a doctoral student in geology, by chance in her Hebrew University building. They date briefly and then marry, though their backgrounds and personalities could not be more dissimilar. They rent a small apartment in the Mekor Barukh neighborhood populated by religious Jews unlike themselves. Michael's aunts and other elderly acquaintances pop in and out of their lives, but Hannah is largely on her own as Michael pursues his degree. While Michael runs his life in a calm, methodical, unemotional manner, Hannah feels increasingly hemmed in by sameness and routine. She begins to escape into private fantasies – some featuring the heroes of her favorite childhood books, like Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff and Captain Nemo – and others based on her own dreams of being an exciting Sephardi woman named Yvonne Azulai, of being raped by strangers, of being a cold princess who commands others to go into battle for her. Two recurrent figures in her fantasies are Arab twin boys with whom she used to play as a child. Michael finally realizes how deeply she has sunken when she has a nervous breakdown one winter day before he is called up to serve in the 1956 Sinai campaign, and orders her to stay in bed until the doctor comes. But he cannot satisfy Hannah's unfulfilled sexual needs and her daydreams and nightmares continue, forcing her downward into a vortex of lust and fantasy. Hannah also finds it difficult to love their child, Yair, who is as pragmatic and non-relationship-oriented as his father. When Hannah finally conceives another child, Michael is no longer hers, having been seduced by an old college