The development of the novel and the rise of modern cities have taken place concurrently. As society has tended more and more to become concentrated in what we call cities, the novel has been a major literary response, concerning itself with the complex interaction among individuals in groups and between individuals and society. (p. 91)

Because the city as a dense heterogeneous society tends to instill in its inhabitants the sense of a threatening "other," the modern Jewish novel becomes a classic example of how the city functions symbolically in modern literature. Like Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, who roams the streets of Dublin as an outsider because he is a Jew, the characters … [in] Amos Oz's My Michael,… never lose their sense of strangeness in the urban environment. (p. 93)

[In] Jerusalem, despite its centuries of civilizations, it is the hills that always dominate, that appear ready to envelop and crush the city at will, and that outlast each layer of shards and stone. The winds of the Judean hills, sweeping over the city like God's whirlwind in the book of Job, overawe man's pretensions and dwarf even the most bold and brilliant of his structures.

In this setting of gold and silver domes and stone bulwarks and in this meeting place of the Levant and the West,… Oz has situated the events of his novel, My Michael…. [The] novel is the first person narrative of Hannah Gonen, an Israeli born young woman who leaves her studies in literature to marry an aspiring geologist, Michael. The rest is a tale of frustration. Michael, Hannah soon discovers, is a sterile, excessively earnest academic whose obsession with identifying rocks she finds incomprehensible and his goals for scholarly publication and university advancement petty. Hannah can find no outlet for her sensual longings—her husband seems distant and dull, and the city treats her with stony indifference. The novel is a record of her disappointments, neuroses, and fantasies. (p. 100)

The city of Jerusalem is not merely background in this novel; it plays a dominant role in that its characteristics are intertwined with the psychology of the central consciousness. It is important to note here the geography and terrain that Hannah Gonen inhabits in the Jerusalem of the 1950's. First, it is a divided city…. Surrounding the city topographically are the Judean hills, vast stretches of bare, dramatic hills that bring cool winds to the city and are covered, for the most part, with shadows and rock, not forest…. The city itself in its totality is heterogeneous, a mixture of Jew, Moslem, and Christian. (pp. 100-01)

What all of this means is that Hannah Gonen lives in a city that may be fairly homogeneous as a section but is heterogeneous organically. Unlike the "other" of ethnic neighborhoods accessible to all in a city like New York, Jerusalem has an invisible hostile area hidden behind hills and walls. But it clearly remains a threatening "other" whose presence is felt even in the parts it does not inhabit, by the force of memory, guilt, and fear. And even in the modern Jewish city of Jerusalem, a variety of cultures dwell side by side. (pp. 101-02)

In Jerusalem, social and spatial features will overlap even more dramatically than in other cities, chiefly because the layout of the city is a constant reminder that its inhabitants are at war and that one group is physically almost completely surrounded by the other…. The hills themselves are indeed dominant in all of Hannah's meditations about her life…. For Hannah, "In the after glow of sunset the Jerusalem hills seemed to be plotting some mischief."… At nightfall in Jerusalem, "at the ends of the streets you can glimpse the brooding hills waiting for darkness to fall on the shuttered city."… In her fantasies, these hills are brooding not only as natural phenomena but as enemy territory: "Worn commando uniforms with creases. A blue vein stands out on Halil's forehead…. Aziz uncurls and throws. The dry shimmer of the explosion. The hills echo and re-echo…"….

But there are other meaningful spatial dimensions of the city. Hannah Gonen lives in an urban area where dwellings are visible miles away, because they cling to bare hills, but at close range they are mysterious, because Middle Eastern architecture frequently means inner courtyards and outer walls…. She also lives in a city that, because of its ancient roots, has a visible modern outer layer and centuries of hidden layers beneath the surface. That her husband Michael is a geologist adds a note of irony to Hannah's predicament: he too is seeking mysteries beneath the earth's surface, but they are the secrets of natural materials, not of the needs and forces of man. Furthermore, Michael is incapable of translating his work metaphorically to search for the inner needs of humans, in this case of his wife's mind. (pp. 102-03)

But the outstanding emotion that Jerusalem elicits from Hannah is that of being lost…. (p. 103)

Nor is she able to see her small region, modern Jerusalem in the State of Israel, as part of a visible whole. Spread over a number of hills, some of which reach into Arab territory, Jerusalem seems infinite, a borderless city…. The paradox about the city for Hannah is that on the one hand the section of it that she inhabits is too familiar—"Maybe it's a pity that Jerusalem is such a small city that you can't get lost in it," she says to Michael as they immediately identify their location after a taxi ride in the rain—while on the other hand, as a total city in her mind, it contains so much that is unknown that she feels immeasurably lost. (pp. 103-04)

It is clear that Oz is using Hannah to depict the isolation and fear that many Israelis feel partially as a country in a state of siege and partially as a small enclave of Western culture in a vast area of cultures and landscapes unlike what they have known….

Both the social and spatial aspects of Jerusalem in this novel express symbolically the awe and insecurity of its inhabitants, particularly during the period during which the novel takes place. Hannah Gonen continually asks existential questions that finally lead her to imagine self-annihilation. Jerusalem, as a Biblical visionary city and as a modern metropolis with borders and neighborhoods, serves as a perfect image for that frame of mind. (p. 104)