by Yona Zeldis McDonough
60 years later, her lusty, doomed heroines come to life
Gertrud Kolmar is hardly a household name, even in the households of the most exalted literary circles. Born in Berlin in 1894, she was a kind of latter-day Emily Dickinson, who led a quiet, reclusive life caring for her aging parents and writing astonishing poetry until the rise of Hitler and her deportation—probably to Auschwitz—abruptly ended her days.