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In September 1938 Kaléko emigrated to New York City together with her second husband, Chemjo Vinaver (1900–1973), a musicologist and conductor specializing in Hasidic choral music, and their son Evjatar (Steven). A long, difficult period of exile followed as she devoted herself to the advancement of her husband’s concert career and cared for her young son. In her diary she wrote, “My world has ‘narrowed’ to two persons: Chemjo and Evjatar. It has nonetheless expanded.” The joy of watching her child’s growth provided a counterweight to the discouragement of having neither the time nor the linguistic context for her own work and the financial and personal strain of Vinaver’s failure to gain a foothold in the world of music. An attempt to make a new start in Hollywood in 1940 proved a disaster and the family returned to New York, where Kaléko wrote jingles for commercials for toiletries and underwear as well as some newspaper reportage. The few poems she wrote reflected the experience of emigration and appealed to the German-language exile newspaper Aufbau. Some prose pieces, “Lower East Side,” described the lives of Eastern European immigrants in Manhattan. Her poems became more serious, with religious content and full of longing for Germany. However, in Verse für Zeitgenossen (Verses for Contemporaries), which was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1945, a year after she received American citizenship, she portrayed her experiences in exile in satirical poems that were reprinted in Germany in 1958.

In 1948 Alfred Polgar had helped Kaléko reestablish connections with Ernst Rowohlt, who reissued Das lyrische Stenogrammheft in 1956. After two weeks it was on the best-seller list. Kaléko returned to Germany in the same year, making successful speaking and reading tours in Europe. She recorded the experience of return in her poems. In 1960 she was nominated for the Fontane Prize for literature, awarded by the Berlin Academy of the Arts, but declined the honor because a former member of the SS was on the jury. In the same year she moved to Jerusalem because of her husband’s work, but never felt truly at home there.

Besides children’s books and more poems, Kaléko wrote epigrams. Although she published nine volumes during the 1960s and 1970s, she lapsed into relative obscurity. Both she and her husband were in ill health, and in 1968 their son, who had become a successful dramatist and director in the United States, died suddenly. They never recovered from this blow. After Chemjo’s death in 1973 Mascha Kaléko’s discouragement and isolation deepened still further. She moved to Zürich, where she died of stomach cancer on January 21, 1975, and was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery at Friesenhof. After her death her works were republished, in large part due to the efforts of her literary executor and later editor/biographer Gisela Zoch-Westphal. In the year of Kaléko’s death the Lyrisches Stenogrammheft appeared in an edition of 100,000 copies.

Das Lyrische Stenogrammheft. Berlin: 1933.

Kleines Lesebuch für Grosse. Berlin: 1935.

Verse für Zeitgenossen. Cambridge, MA: 1945.

Der Papagei, die Mamagei und andere komische Tiere. Hannover: 1961.

Verse in Dur und Moll. Olten, Freiburg i. Br. 1967.

Das himmelgraue Poesie-Album der Mascha Kaléko. Berlin: 1968.

Der Gott der kleinen Webfehler. Spaziergänge durch New Yorks Lower Eastside und Greenwich Village. Düsseldorf: 1977.

In meinen Träumen läutet es Sturm. Gedichte und Epigramme aus dem Nachlass. München: 1977.

Heute ist morgen schon gestern. Gedichte aus dem Nachlass. Berlin: 1980.

Ich bin von anno dazumal. Chansons, lieder, gedichte. Berlin: 1984.

Mein Lied Geht Weiter: Hundert Gedichte, edited by Gisela Zoch-Westphal. Munich: DTV, 2007.