Mascha Kaléko was born in 1907 as the daughter of a Russian father and an Austrian mother. The family fled from the persecution of Jews in Galicia to Germany in 1918. Mascha spend her teenage years in Berlin. In 1928 she marries the philologist Saul Kaléko. In 1934 she meets and falls in love with the Jewish composer Chemjo Vinaver and starts a four year long affair until her divorce from Saul in 1938.

Chemjo and Mascha flee to New York where she continues to write poetry in German, her mother language. By the time she wrote this poem she already lived in New York, where she suffered from loneliness and the fact that she could not get her German poetry published.