Isak Samokovlija was a prominent Bosnian Jewish writer. By profession he was a physician. His stories describe the life of the Bosnian Sephardic Jews.
Biography
Samokovlija was born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Goražde, Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the Austro-Hungarian occupation. While one side of his family came from Spain after the Expulsion of Jews from Spain, "his great-grandfather moved to Bosnia from the town of Samokov in Bulgaria", which led to "the surname Los Samokovlis in Ladino or Samokovlija in Bosnian. After completing primary school Samokovlija went to Sarajevo. He attended high school with Ivo Andric, the first Yugoslav to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After graduating high school in 1910, he receive a scholarship from local Jewish charityLa Benevolencija to study medicine in Vienna. Later he worked as a doctor in the towns Goražde and Fojnica before beginning a regular job at Sarajevo's Koševo hospital in 1925. At the beginning of the Second World War, he was a department head at the Koševo hospital. In April 1941 he was discharged from service as well as other Jews, but soon he was mobilized as a medical doctor fights against a typhus epidemic. It was not until 1945, he managed to escape Yugoslavia and hide until the country was liberated. After the end of World War II, he held various positions in the Bosnian and Yugoslav literary circles. From 1948-51 he edited the magazine Brazda, and then, until his death he was an editor at the publishing company Svjetlost. His first short storyRafina avlija was published in 1927 and two years later his first collection of stories, Od proljeća do proljeća, came out. Several of his stories were made into television films and his book Hanka was made into a film of the same name directed by Slavko Vorkapić in 1955. He did not live to see the film, dying at age 65 in January 1955. He was buried in the old Jewish cemetery on the slopes of Trebević mountain, near Sarajevo.
