Sami michael biography

Sami Michael (Hebrew: סמי מיכאל, Arabic: سامي ميخائيل; 15 August 1926 – 1 April 2024) was an.
Sami Michael was an Israeli Iraqi author, having migrated from Iraq to Israel at the age of 23.
Michael was born in a wealthy mixed neighborhood of Baghdad in 1926 and was active in the Communist Party as a young man.

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Sami Michael

Sami Michael, one of Israel’s best-known authors, was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1926. At age 15, he joined a leftist underground movement acting against the regime in Iraq. In 1948, his activities were discovered and he fled to Iran, making his way to Israel a year later. After working for four years as an editor at Arabic-language dailies, he studied hydrology at the British Institute and joined the Israel Hydrology Authority where he worked for 25 years. During this time, he also studied psychology and Arabic literature at Haifa University. Michael has published novels, youth books, non-fiction and a number of plays. He has received many literary awards, including the WIZO Prize (Paris), the ACUM Prize, the Brenner Prize (2004), the Ze`ev Prize, an IBBY Award (Berlin), the Israel Prize, the President`s Prize (2005), the EMET Prize (2007) and the ACUM Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012). For his work for peace, he has been honored by the UN-supported Society for International Development, and the Association for Promotion of Peace in the Middle East (Italy).

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The Israeli novelist Sami Michael evolved from an Iraqi Jewish communist writing in his native Arabic language to an Israeli Jewish Mizrahi liberal writing in Hebrew. Noga Emanuel explores a body of work that is neither nostalgic for an idyllic exilic past in the ‘old country,’ nor sentimental about the present, but is the emblematic, ironic, unique, all-Israeli voice of ‘Otherness’ and edgy Israeli pluralism. This article was updated on 17/12/2014.

Three Vignettes

In November 1972, Orianna Fallaci sat down to talk to Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir. The Italian journalist and author, one of the most original and controversial interviewers of her time, recorded Meir’s remarks in her 1976 book ‘Interview with History’:

We in Israel have absorbed about 1,400,000 Arab Jews: from Iraq, from Yemen, from Egypt, from Syria, from North African countries like Morocco. People who when they got here were full of diseases and didn’t know how to do anything. Among the seventy thousands Jews who came here from Yemen, for example, there wasn’t a single doctor or a single nurse,
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Sami Michael
MICHAEL, SAMI (1926– ), Israeli writer. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, to a middle-class family, Michael attended Jewish primary and secondary schools. After the pogroms in 1941 (the Farhoud), he joined the Communist underground. Years later, he explained that it was both as a Jew and as an Iraqi patriot that he chose to struggle for seven years in the underground, in the belief that only Communism had the potential to bring about a liberal society in Iraq which would, among other things, support the advancement of its Jewish citizens ("Unbounded Ideas," 2000). With the outbreak of the War of Independence in Israel, the situation of the Jews in Iraq worsened. Michael, targeted both as a Jew and as a Communist, fled to Iran, from where, with the help of the Jewish Agency in Teheran, he arrived in Israel in April 1949. "I belong to Israel out of love, not out of ideology," is how Michael describes his identity as an Israeli, eschewing a Zionist as well as an anti-Zionist definition. Michael sees himself first and foremost as a Jew, heir to the 2,500-year-old