المأساة والسخرية في قصص سمير نقاش

Binyamin Rish reads Naqqāsh’s story “The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried” as a philosophical text about how people come to know themselves and the world. Its two protagonists embody opposing traditions. Isḥāq ʿĪda is a misanthropic empiricist who believes in a vengeful God, and Shaul Hillel is a humanist rationalist who believes in a merciful one. The article argues that Naqqāsh shows both approaches failing, portraying human existence as permanently caught in duality.

Geula Elimelekh compares Samir Naqqash with Franz Kafka, showing that dehumanization and metamorphosis recur in Naqqash’s stories as they do in Kafka’s. Like Kafka, Naqqash moves from a specific local reality, that of Iraqi Jews, to universal themes of the twentieth century: man abandoned without divine providence, chasing reason and science after the collapse of his spiritual world.