Ha-‘akarah (The Barren Wife)

Yitshak Shami was an unusual contributor to the world of Hebrew literature in the interwar years: his background was Mizrahi rather than Ashkenazi, and his fiction featured Palestinian Arabs. Born in Hebron to a Syrian Jewish family, he moved to Jerusalem at age seventeen, adopted Western dress, and attended a teachers’ seminary, where he received a certificate in 1909 and began publishing short stories. He taught in Jewish schools in Damascus and Bulgaria and then returned to the Land of Israel in 1919, where he made his home first in Tiberias and then in Hebron. His literary output was slim: a book of short stories and two novellas, written largely in the 1920s.