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Yaʿqūb (Lev) Bilbul (1920–2003) was a short story writer, poet, businessman, and lawyer. He grew up in Baghdad and was educated at the Alliance Israélite Universelle and Shammash schools. He worked for the Chamber of Commerce of Baghdad, becoming its director when Me’ir (Mīr) Baṣrī stepped down in 1945, and served in that position until he emigrated to Israel in 1951. He earned his law degree in Israel in 1956. In addition to his varied literary activities by which he aspired to contribute to the Iraqi literary renaissance, Bilbul also wrote articles about business and economics.Bilbul’s…

Born in 1927, Yiṣḥaq Bar-Moshe grew up in a middle-class religious family in Baghdad. After graduating from the Jewish community’s Rahil Shahmoun School, he attended a government high school before studying law at the Baghdad Law College. Briefly involved with the Communist movement, Bar-Moshe subsequently affiliated with the Zionist underground. Arriving in Israel during the mass exodus, he was housed in a transit camp (Heb. maʿabara) for three years. In 1958, he joined the Israeli Arabic broadcasting station, becoming head of its political department, before founding Al-Anbāʾ, …

Born in Amarra, Iraq, in 1913, Shalom Darwīsh attended the Rahil Shahmoun School after his family moved to Baghdad. He continued his studies at night while serving as secretary of the Jewish community, and graduated from the Baghdad College of Law in 1938, at which point he left his position as secretary to practice law. An Iraqi nationalist, Darwīsh was elected to parliament as a member of the National Democratic Party, but he resigned along with others in protest of electoral corruption and improprieties. Accused of being a Zionist, he fled overland in 1950 to Iran and from there to Israel.B…

Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004) was an Iraqi-born Israeli writer of short stories, novellas, novels, and plays. He depicted his family in Baghdad as very comfortable if not wealthy. He was a passionate reader from a young age.Naqqāsh considered his family’s move to Israel in 1951 to have been the great tragedy of his life, and blamed the premature death of his father on the harsh conditions in the transit camp (Heb. maʿabara) where they were settled. A younger brother also died following the move, shortly after taking a fall of uncertain causes. Unhappy, Naqqāsh fled to…

Shimʿon Ballas was born in 1930 in Baghdad. He was brought up in a Christian neighborhood of the city and educated at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school. He developed a love for literature through French novels and French translations. Politically active, he worked for Senator Ezra Menahem Daniel and joined the Iraqi Communist Party at an early age. As the situation in Iraq became untenable for Communists and Zionists, he emigrated to Israel in 1951. There he worked as editor of Arab affairs for Kol ha-ʿAm for a time, then left to dedicate more time to his writing, and es…

Born in Baghdad in 1937, Eli Amir arrived in Israel with his family in 1950 during the mass immigration from Iraq and was sent, with other teenagers, to Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek. He later found work in the office of the prime minister, becoming in turn Arab affairs adviser, deputy director general of the Ministry of Immigrant Affairs, and director general of the Youth Immigration Division of the Jewish Agency (Aliyat Ha-Noʿar), where he applied lessons from his own experience to help new adolescent arrivals.Amir's writing is characterizd by humor that helps lubricate the way fo…

Born Saleh Kemal Menashe Mejaled in 1926, the Israeli writer Sami Michael grew up in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad before moving to the suburbs. Active in the Communist underground as a young man, he fled to Iran and was later sentenced to death in absentia. Airlifted to Israel in 1949, he joined the editorial staff of the Arabic newspaper al-Ittiḥād and published stories in the journal al-Jadīd under the name Samir Mārid. After completing his compulsory army service, he joined the Israel Hydrological Service, where he worked until taking early retirement in 1…