Literatureשמעון בלס

Shimon Ballas

Shimon Ballas was an Iraqi-Israeli writer and a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Haifa.

1930 to 2019The novel HaMa'abaraWriting on Iraqi Jewish identityPresidential Literature Prize

Born: 6 March 1930, Baghdad
Died: 29 September 2019
Occupation: writer
Education: Tel Aviv University, University of Paris

Shimon Ballas was born in 1930 in Baghdad

Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad on March 6, 1930. He studied at the Alliance school and finished high school in Baghdad. He joined the underground Iraqi Communist Party and wrote reviews and articles in Arabic.

In 1951 he moved to Israel and lived in the Ashkelon transit camp. After his release from the IDF he studied Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. He joined Maki and first wrote for the communist press in Arabic, then slowly moved to Hebrew.

From 1961 to 1965 he worked at the newspaper Kol HaAm. His first Hebrew novel, HaMa'abara, appeared in 1964 and described the trauma of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. In 1970 he completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris.

In 1974 he began teaching Arabic language and literature at the University of Haifa. He called himself an Arab Jew and was a peace activist. His work dealt with the dual identity of Iraqi Jews in Israel, as in his 2003 novel Tel Aviv Mizrah.

He won the Presidential Literature Prize in 2006. He was married to art scholar Gila Ballas. He died on September 29, 2019, and was buried at Kibbutz Regavim.