Mascha Kaléko


Mascha Kaléko was a Jewish German language poet.

Biography

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, she captured 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 United States with her second husband, the composer Chemjo Vinaver, and their one-year-old son Steven, who became a 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 until settling on Minetta Street in New York City's Greenwich Village in 1942. Her fifth floor walkup apartment 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, Massachusetts published Kaléko's third book "Verse für Zeitgenossen" in 1945.
In 1956, Kaléko returned to Berlin for the first time. Three years later she was supposed to receive the Fontane prize, which she declined since it would have been handed over by a former Nazi official.
In 1959, she moved to Jerusalem, Israel, since her husband, who was conducting research on Hassidic singing, had better working conditions there. Mascha lacked knowledge of Hebrew and was thus somewhat isolated.
Kaléko died in January 1975 in Zürich where she fell ill en route back to Jerusalem from a final visit in Berlin. She is buried in Israelitischer Friedhof Oberer Friesenberg.
Some of her poems were published posthumously, including "Sozusagen grundlos vergnügt", in 1977 in the collection In meinen Träumen läutet es Sturm. edited by, to whom Kaléko had entrusted her unpublished writings.
Various attempts have been made to translate individual poems into English. In March 2010, for the first time, a representative number of Kaléko's poems appeared in English translation in the book "'No matter where I travel, I come to Nowhereland' - The poetry of Mascha Kaléko". The author, Andreas Nolte, has selected poems from every phase of the poet's life. His translations follow the original German texts as closely as possible in order to maintain the kalékoesque content, diction, rhythm, and rhyme. Brief introductions provide additional information on Kaléko's remarkable biography.

Quote

From the poem "Mein schönstes Gedicht"
From the poem "Was man so braucht" :
The poem "Pihi":

Works

Published posthumously: