Malka Locker

Malka Locker was born in 1887 in Kuty, known in Yiddish as Kitev, a town in what was then the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, now Ukraine.[1][2][3] She came from a long line of rabbis, and education was important to her family, with Malka receiving a secular education as well as a Yiddish one.[3] She went on to learn German, French, and English, as well as Polish, Ukrainian, and Hebrew.[3]

In 1910, she married the Zionist activist Berl Locker, who was her cousin.[1][4] The couple traveled the world together, spending a decade living in London from 1938 to 1948.[1][2] They permanently settled in Israel in 1948, having first spent time in then-Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s.[5][6]

Locker is best known for her work as a poet, but she did not begin writing poetry until she was 42 years old.[1][4] She began writing on the suggestion of a friend, who had identified a "poetic quality" in her correspondence.[1] As she began to publish poems in the 1930s, her work received some notice from Yiddish critics.[1]

She published at least six books of poetry, beginning with Velt un mentsh ("World and Man") in 1931.[1][7] Subsequent collections included Du ("You") in 1932; Shtet ("Cities"), about London, in 1942; and The World Is Without a Protector: 1940–1945 in 1947.[1][2][3][7] While she wrote primarily in Yiddish, she also published one book of poems in German, and her writing was also translated into Hebrew and French.[1][8]

Locker also produced various works of literary criticism, with a focus on French romantic and symbolic poetry, including a 1965 book on Arthur Rimbaud, a 1970 biography of Charles Baudelaire, and a 1976 biography of Paul Verlaine.[1][3][7][9][10][11] She was also a composer, notably writing the choral works "Luekh trts"v" and "Luekh trts'kh" in 1938, and would sing in Yiddish locally and internationally.[2]

She died in Jerusalem in 1990, at age 103.[1]