Mimi Grossberg (1905–1997)

Mimi Grossberg was born Emilie Buchwald to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Her parents were Adele (Durst) and Saloman Buchwald. She had a younger brother Julius Buchwald, who also became a poet. After graduating from high school, she got a job as a librarian and then completed an apprenticeship to become a milliner in 1929. While working, she took classes in psychology with Dr. Alfred Adler and music composition theory with Paul Amadeus Pisk. She was a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAP). In 1930, she married Norbert Grossberg and joined the Association of Young Austrian Authors, which organized readings in the Cabaret Literature am Naschmarkt. She also wrote poetry, and published her first collection of poems in 1935. Shortly after Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in 1938, Grossberg and her husband fled to the USA, settling in New York City. There they found work in a hat factory. Despite her efforts to secure exit visas for her parents, they never made it out and died at the death camp at Auschwitz in 1942. However, her younger brother Julius Buchwald survived the Holocaust and joined her in New York in 1946. In 1956, Grossberg published her second volume of poetry, Versäume, dreame... She became one of the most influential representatives of Austrian writers in the USA. She worked with the Austrian Forum as the editor of four anthologies of poetry by Austrian writers in exile and gave lectures on their work. In 1968, with Irene Harand and Gottfried Heindl, she put together an exhibition in New York on the life and work of 62 fellow Austrian writers in the USA. The exhibition was also shown in the Amerika-Haus in Vienna in 1970. In 1974, Grossberg was awarded Austria's highest honor for authors and poets, the Goldene Ehrenzeichen der Republik (Gold Medal of Honor of the Republic). In 1988, she published her autobiography, The Road to America.