Mascha Kaléko

Mascha Kaléko (born Golda Malka Aufen; June 7, 1907 – January 21, 1975) was a Jewish German language poet.

Her family moved from Galicia to Germany after World War I.

In 1928 she married the Hebrew teacher Saul Aaron Kaléko. From 1929 on, she published poetry presenting the daily life of the common people in the newspapers Vossische Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt. In her poetry that was positively reviewed by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Alfred Polgar she captures the atmosphere of Berlin in the 1930s. She attained fame and frequented places like the "Romanisches Café", where the literary world met, among them Erich Kästner and Kurt Tucholsky.

In January 1933, Rowohlt published her first book with poetry Lyrisches Stenogrammheft, which was soon subjected to Nazi censorship, and two years later her second book Das kleine Lesebuch für Grosse appeared, also with the publisher Rowohlt. In 1938, she managed to emigrate to the USA with her second husband, the composer Chemjo Vinaver, and their one-year-old son Steven, who became a talented writer and theatre personality in adult life. Steven fell ill with pancreatitis while directing a play in Massachusetts, and died at the age of 31.

While in the USA, Mascha lived at several places (New York City and a few months in California) until settling on Minetta Street in New York City's Greenwich Village in 1942. Her fifth floor walkup apartment Minetta Street was a safe haven she always remembered fondly. Mascha became the family's breadwinner with odd jobs, including some writing copy for advertisements. The family's hope of a possible career for Chemjo in the film industry was crushed, and they returned to New York after a brief stint in Hollywood. The Schoenhof Verlag in Cambridge, MA published Kaléko's third book "Verse für Zeitgenossen" in 1945 (German edition in 1958 by Rowohlt Verlag).

...
Wikipedia