Amalia Moscovitz was born in Budapest and raised primarily on the estate of her affluent, assimilated family in Alsókörtvélyes (today Hrušov, Slovakia). Anna Lesznai—her artistic pseudonym—became active in Budapest’s avant-garde salons as a teenager. She wove her many different media—painting, poetry, illustration, scholarship, folktales, and Hungarian embroidery (himzés)—into a coherent artistic-intellectual modernist aesthetic. In 1939, Lesznai fled Hungary for America, with her soon-to-be (third) husband, Tibor Gergely. There she taught pedagogical and applied arts at Wellesley College and elsewhere.
With you, it is not impossible to define
creatures and things with the simplicity
of the fish whose scales streak the sea with blue and gold,
Or of the sea itself that swells with the gracefulness of…
At home I have a blue piano,
I, who cannot play a note.
It stands in the gloom of the cellar door,
now that the world has grown coarse.
The four hands of the stars play there
—the moonwife sang…