Voices Displaced, Narratives Interrupted: Mascha Kaléko’s Performed Poetry

This paper explores the vocal and performative dimensions of Kaléko’s work and how her voice—both literal and metaphorical—interrupted Jewish and Israeli perceptions of German poetry, which had come to be associated with the language of the perpetrators. For Kaléko, the suppression of German in Jerusalem led her to develop new artistic forms that subverted dominant Jewish national narratives. By continuing to write and perform in German after the Shoah, she reasserted her German-Jewish identity, calling into question how voice, gender, and migration at once construct and disrupt Jewish national and transnational narratives of belonging.