Mascha Kaléko (née Golda Malka Aufen, 7th June 1907 – 21st January 1975) was born in Chrzanów then in Austro-Hungary and now in Poland. The child of a Russian Jewish businessman, she moved to Germany with her family after the outbreak of the First World War to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and military conflict. Following school and further studies in Berlin, in 1929 Kaléko began publishing her poetry in newspapers. Her first book Lyrisches Stenogrammheft appeared in January 1933, shortly before Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor.

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 the same year the writer moved to Jerusalem, where she struggled with constant health and financial problems, but was visiting Europe when she died in Zurich in 1975.