Woche gegen das Vergessen: Mascha Kaléko – Die Nachtigall in meinem Garten schweigt - Musikalische Lesung mit Judith Jakob und Joachim Jezewski
Patronage "Week Against Forgetting":
Mike Josef, Mayor of the City of Frankfurt am Main
Judith Jakob, Recitation
Joachim Jezewski, Piano
Judith Jakob portrays the life of the poet Mascha Kaléko through her verses and diary entries. She is musically supported on the piano by Joachim Jezewski.
Mascha Kaléko is born in 1907 in Chrzanòw, Galicia. In 1914, the family emigrates to Germany and moves to Berlin after World War I. By the late twenties, Mascha Kaléko finds connection among poets and writers in the "Romanischen Café," where she meets, among others, Tucholsky and Claire Waldoff; she is compared to Erich Kästner and the young Heinrich Heine. She is a poet of everyday life, capturing the spirit of the time; her poems about the everyday lives of "little people," where she combines Berlin wit with the sorrow and wisdom from the Jewish East, are received enthusiastically. Her first book, the "Lyrical Stenographic Notebook," becomes a bestseller for the Jewish writer in 1933. After her second book, "The Little Reader for Grown-Ups" (1935), Mascha Kaléko's writings are banned by the National Socialists. However, they continue to spread widely through underground channels.
In 1938, she emigrates to America with her husband Chemjo Vinaver and their son. Difficult years follow, marked by poverty and isolation. She writes little. In the 1950s, Rowohlt reprints her poems. She is nominated for the Fontane Prize, but she declines the award because a former SA member is on the jury. Out of love for her husband and his musical legacy, she emigrates to Israel, where she will always feel foreign. Once again, Mascha Kaléko falls silent. Tragedies mark her life. In 1968, her son unexpectedly dies; in 1973, her husband succumbs to a severe illness. In 1974, she travels to Europe for the last time. She gives one final reading in Berlin. Mascha Kaléko dies in 1975 in Zurich.
Homesickness, for what? When I say homesickness, I say “dream.”
For the old homeland hardly exists.
When I say homesickness, I mean much:
What long weighed us down in exile.
We are now strangers in our hometown.
Only the “pain” remains.
The “home” is gone.
Photo: Alexander Englert
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
