The Ma’abarah: Life in Israel’s Transit Camps

Shimon Ballas was born in Iraq and immigrated to Israel. His novel The Ma’abarah (The Immigrant Transit Camp), published in 1964, helped launch a new genre in Israeli literature. Though Ballas later wrote a memoir based on his own experience in a transit camp, this novel was the first popular work of fiction to tell the story of the struggles of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in Israel. Earlier drafts were written in Arabic, but Ballas published the novel in Hebrew, giving it a wider audience that included those depicted as oppressors. In this excerpt, residents of the camp struggle to organize and represent themselves, revealing both their resilience and the divisions within their fragile community.