Mascha Kaléko was a new luminary of the literature scene of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, until the Nazi regime put an end to her young career. Born in Galicia in 1907, she came to Germany with her parents as a war refugee and lived in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district from 1918. Mascha initially worked as a secretary in the workers’ welfare office of the Jewish community at Auguststraße 17, where she met her first husband Saul Kaléko.
Her first work Das lyrische Stenogrammheft (1933) was a great success. The young couple moved to Charlottenburg. Mascha was quickly regarded as one of the new talents of the Berlin literary scene, which met regularly in the Romanisches Café in Charlottenburg.
But the Nazis soon put an end to this. The marriage fell apart. Saul moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, Mascha married the composer and musicologist Chemjo Vinaver, but kept the surname Kaléko as her artist’s name. In 1938, Mascha was able to emigrate to the USA with Vinaver and her young son and moved into an apartment on Minetta Street in Manhattan. She later moved to Jerusalem with Vinaver.
After the war, she found a readership in Germany once again. In 1974, she visited Berlin for the last time and gave a lecture at the American Memorial Library in Kreuzberg in September. On January 21, 1975, the poet died of stomach cancer.
Sources/Literature:
- Gisela Zoch-Westphal: Aus den sechs Leben der Mascha Kaléko. Biographische Skizzen, ein Tagebuch und Briefe mit 62 Fotos und Zeichnungen sowie 19 Dokumenten, Arani Verlag, Berlin 1987.
- Jutta Rosenkranz: Mascha Kaléko, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München 2024.