THE LYRICAL STENOBOOK / LITTLE READER FOR GROWN-UPS

  • The most successful German poetry collection of the 20th century, reissued on the 50th anniversary of the poet's death.
  • Timeless and full of life’s wisdom, thoughtful and humorous: Mascha Kaléko’s verses still strike straight to the heart.

Mascha Kaléko’s "lyrische Stenogramme" (“lyrical shorthand notes”) have lost none of their magic. They are snapshots from the world of the eight-hour workday, of furnished melancholy, of the lovesick and longing of our time. Her poems capture the world of all those weighed down by the same sorrow: the metropolis of today and of the past.

To the many thousands who were captivated by Kaléko’s poetry when her collections Das lyrische Stenogrammheft (1933) and Kleines Lesebuch für Große (1934) first appeared, many more readers continue to be drawn. The works of this exceptional poet – the only well-known female voice of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement – remain as insightful and intelligent as they are moving and entertaining today.

Kaléko’s poems about love, farewell, loneliness, and longing are imbued with what Thomas Mann once praised as a sense of "tidied-up melancholy". Her folksong-like verses are urban fairytales that, together, form a reader’s book about life itself.

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English World - Pushkin Press (non-exclusively)

  • Publisher: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
  • Release: 01.11.1974
  • ISBN: 978-3-499-11784-8
  • 176 Pages
  • Author: Mascha Kaléko

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Buchcover von THE LYRICAL STENOBOOK / LITTLE READER FOR GROWN-UPS
Mascha Kaléko THE LYRICAL STENOBOOK / LITTLE READER FOR GROWN-UPS
Portrait von Mascha Kaléko
© ullstein bild - Fotografisches Atelier Ullstein
Mascha Kaléko

The poet Mascha Kaléko was born in 1907 to a Russian father and an Austrian mother. After completing her schooling and university studies in Berlin, she was discovered in 1930 by Monty Jacobs, one of the pioneers of German cultural journalism, for the Vossische Zeitung . For years, her poems appeared there and in the Berliner Tageblatt , quickly making her a literary celebrity in the old imperial capital and beyond. Since 1938, the poet lived as an American citizen in New York with her husband, the conductor and composer Chemjo Vinaver, and their son Steven, who inherited her poetic talent. Mascha Kaléko died in Zurich in January 1975 after spending several years living in Jerusalem.