The work of poet Mascha Kaléko was marked by the experience of homelessness and rootlessness. Born the child of a Russian Jewish businessman in Western Galicia (now Poland), she moved to Germany with her family after the outbreak of the First World War to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and military entanglements. Following school and further studies in Berlin, in 1929 Kaléko began publishing her poetry in newspapers. Her first book publication, The Lyrical Shorthand Pad, appeared in Berlin’s Rowohlt Verlag in January 1933, shortly before Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. She was able to issue her Little Reader for the Grown-Ups the following year, and it also sold well.                                                                                                    

Even though the writer was already well established in Berlin’s literary scene and creative bohemia, restrictive Nazi cultural policies made it impossible for Kaléko to publish after 1937. Together with her second husband, conductor and musicologist Chemjo Vinaver, and their son Steven Vinaver, she fled into American exile in September 1938. In New York Kaléko supported the family with copywriting.

After the war Kaléko’s books once again appeared in Germany. She was offered the Fontane Prize in 1960 but rejected it because one of the jury members had been in the SS. In 1960 the writer moved to Jerusalem, where she struggled with constant health and financial problems. Mascha Kaléko, who as a German-speaking émigré was continually pained by her separation from her German-speaking homeland, was visiting Europe when she died in Zurich in 1975.

Selected works:
Das lyrische Stenogrammheft (poemns, 1933)
Kleines Lesebuch für Große (poems, 1934)
Verse für Zeitgenossen (poems, 1945)
Der Papagei, die Mamagei und andere komische Tiere (poems, 1961)
Wie’s auf dem Mond zugeht (poems, 1971)

Further reading:
Kaléko, Mascha: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Jutta Rosenkranz. München: dtv 2. Auflage 2013
Rosenkranz, Jutta: Mascha Kaléko. Biografie. München: dtv 2012