The Woman Poet

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.