stone houses, iron railings, narrow alleys, and hidden courtyards – to elicit feelings of hopelessness and "cutting people off from one another". Duality also appears throughout the novel. Dana Amir points to the characters of the Arab twins, the contrasting characters of the two Michaels – "Michael Gonen, the grey, reserved, submissive, dry-witted man contrasts with Michael Strogoff, the invincible hero of the inner world whose eyes are filled with blue metal" – and the contrasting character of Hannah herself – a "quiet, introverted student" as compared to "her dream-double: a princess who holds the strangers that humiliate her tight in her sadomasochistic grip". Doubleness extends to setting and dialogue, with clear divisions drawn between Hannah's inner and outer worlds. Development My Michael was Amos Oz's second novel. When Oz, a member of Kibbutz Hulda, first began writing stories, he received permission from the kibbutz administration to spend one day a week writing and the other days teaching or working in the fields. But Oz said he worked on this novel every night as well. While his wife and daughters slept in their one-and-a-half-room apartment, he sat in the lavatory with the book on his knees, writing and smoking until the wee hours. After My Michael was published, Oz gave the royalties to the kibbutz, and successfully petitioned the kibbutz administration to allow him two days a week for writing. Critics have noted that Hannah, the narrator of the novel, reflects "all the intelligence, romanticism, and melancholy" of Oz's own mother, who committed suicide when he was twelve years old. Oz rejected this comparison. Publishing history My Michael was published in Hebrew in 1968 by Am Oved. It was the best-selling novel in Israel in the 1968–1969 season, with nearly 40,000 copies sold in its first 18 months. The novel was reissued by Keter Publishing House in 1990 and 2008, and by Keter/Yediot Aharonoth in 2010. The English edition, translated by Nicholas de Lange, would be the first of 16 of Oz's books translated into English by the British academic. The English edition was first published in 1972 by Chatto & Windus (London) and Alfred A. Knopf (New York). My Michael has been translated into more than 30 languages. It is one of two Oz titles that have been translated into Arabic. Many of the book's international publishers printed a special twentieth-anniversary edition in 1988. Reception Upon its publication, the