Description

Mascha Kaléko (born Golda Malka Aufen, 1907–1975) was a poet and a twice-over emigrant. To escape pogroms at the beginning of World War I, her Jewish parents were forced to move with their children from Chrzanów (a town in modern-day southern Poland) to Germany. From the late 1920s, the poet began publishing poems in German newspapers and entered the circle of Berlin’s creative bohemia, which gathered around the famous “Romanisches Café.” Her first two poetry collections, “Lyrisches Stenogrammheft” (“Lyrical Shorthand Notebook,” 1933) and “Das kleine Lesebuch für Große” (“The Little Reader for Grown-ups,” 1935), brought her success and broad literary recognition. However, in 1938, the Nazi regime deemed them “harmful and undesirable.” That same year, Mascha Kaléko emigrated to the United States with her second husband, musician Chemjo Vinaver, and her son, Steven.

She escaped the worst. But homesickness weighed on her until her death. She never found a new home anywhere, having “chosen love as her homeland.”