This chapter examines the progressive Arabic literary roots of Mizrahi fiction with a focus on its founding genre, the literature of the transit camps (sifrut hama’abara). I trace the participation of writers such as Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael in the Palestinian and Arab Jewish communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad in the 1950s. This repressed cultural history reveals that the magazine’s popular literary campaign first launched the transit camp stories in Arabic. The chapter then looks at the elision of these Arabic sources by literary critics who framed Mizrahi literature as a Hebrew and Israeli literary development. By putting the foundational Mizrahi and transit camp novel, Shimon Ballas’s Ha-ma’abara (The Transit Camp), into conversation with the author’s Arabic works, I challenge the scope and coloniality of the Hebrew criticism. In the novel, Ballas continued to engage with themes of social and economic justice, his focus in the 1950s. While the novel broke with institutional communism of that decade, it proposed other working-class community-organizing models based on mutual aid. The power of community is presented as a product of intensive collective care and an anticolonial spirit, clearly inspired by the popular writing of al-Jadid. The chapter proposes freeing Mizrahi literatures from the Israeli national silo and placing them in renewed conversation with both Arabic literatures and Global left cultures.