Sami Michael

Sami Michael was born in 1926 in Baghdad

Sami Michael was born Kamal Salah in Baghdad on 15 August 1926, the firstborn of a large secular Jewish family. His father was a merchant. He grew up in a neighborhood of Jews, Muslims and Christians and finished Shamash School in 1945.

At 15 he joined a Communist underground group against the Iraqi regime, and he later wrote for the Iraqi press. After an arrest warrant was issued in 1948, he fled to Iran and joined the Tudeh party. An Iraqi court sentenced him to death in absentia, and in 1949 he came to Israel.

He settled in Wadi Nisnas in Haifa and worked as an editor at the Communist papers Al Ittihad and Al Jadid, writing a column as Samir Mared. He left the party in 1955. He then worked for 25 years as a hydrologist in northern Israel and studied psychology and Arabic literature at the University of Haifa.

In 1974 he published his first Hebrew novel, All Men are Equal, But Some are More, about immigrants in transit camps. He published 11 novels, 3 non-fiction books, 3 plays and a children's book, many set in Baghdad or Haifa. From 1981 to 1987 he translated the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz.

From 2001 he was president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and he called for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He received the EMET Prize in 2007. He died on 1 April 2024.