Samokovlija was born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Goražde, Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the Austro-Hungarian occupation.

He attended high school with Ivo Andrić, the first Yugoslav to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

[3] After graduating high school in 1910, he received a scholarship from local Jewish charity La Benevolencija to study medicine in Vienna.

[3][4] Later he worked as a doctor in the towns Goražde and Fojnica (1921–25)[5] before beginning a regular job at Sarajevo's Koševo hospital in 1925.

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.

After the end of World War II, he held various positions in the Bosnian and Yugoslav literary circles.