In a 2005 non-fiction work, Ratson Halevi (1921-2006) tells the tale of the “Ape Man,” a Jewish boy in Yemen who was raised by baboons in the wilderness in the 1930s, became a Muslim, returned to Judaism, and emigrated to Israel. This paper will bring to bear both literary and historical perspectives on this strange story. Its conclusions will also shed light on issues common to the substantial corpus of autobiographical works by Jews from Yemen to which Halevi’s work belongs that have been published in Israel since the 1970s. At the outset of the Ape Man narrative, the author mischievously suggests that the Ape Man’s son, a young man with whom he worked in the citrus orchards, was so fond of Tarzan films that they influenced his retelling of events. In light of this, I will first discuss the significance of the motif of the autodidactic “wild boy” (explored in Avner Ben Zaken’s recent monograph on Hayy Ibn Yaqzan). I will then turn to debates among commentators on Bakhtin over whether carnivalesque narratives featuring disguise, an animalistic fool as protagonist, and temporary role reversal, either subvert or reinforce existing social institutions. I hope to show how Halevi uses these literary techniques in order to call into question the validity of distinctions between Muslims and Jews in Yemen that were widely taken for granted by both communities. In this regard, he stresses the theme of food and drink, a kind of “red line” past which the Jew crossed into Islam by eating forbidden meat and Muslims crossed into Judaism by drinking Jewish alcohol. In addition, far from affirming a political Zionist narrative of Jewish return, the Mizrahi struggle in Israel shapes the story of the Ape Man. Drawing from this and other works by Halevi, I will demonstrate how the author’s own iconoclasm (a deliberately archaic style, ambivalence towards Western literature, rejection of secularization, and friendship with radical rabbi Uzi Meshullam) plays a role in framing the Ape Man narrative. I will conclude that the Ape Man narrative aims to express the alienation of second- and third-generation Yemeni Jews in Israel by expressing ambivalence towards both Muslim-Jewish coexistence and intra-Jewish harmony.