Creator Bio
Gertrud Kolmar
1894–1943
Gertrud Kolmar was the pseudonym of the German lyric poet and writer Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner. Kolmar came from a nonobservant Berlin family to whom she remained close, until her deportation to Auschwitz in 1943. Her poetry captures her feelings of alienation and isolation, as a woman and a Jew. In the 1930s, as the situation of Jews in Germany worsened, she turned increasingly to Jewish themes in her work and in 1940 began to study Hebrew, hoping to immigrate to Palestine. The Jewish Mother (the correct translation of the title) was her only novel.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
A Jewish Mother from Berlin
Martha Jadassohn had come with her parents from a small West Poznanian town, named either Bobst or Meseritz, to Berlin where her father’s only sister, a widow, was living alone…
Primary Source
The Jewish Woman
I am a stranger.
Since no one dares approach me
I would be girded with towers
That wear their steep and stone-gray caps
Aloft in clouds.
The brazen key you will not find
That locks the musty…
Primary Source
The Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…