Malka Locker

Malka Locker (1887–1990; ; ) was a Ukrainian-born Israeli poet, writing primarily in Yiddish.

Biography 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. 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. The couple traveled the world together, spending a decade living in London from 1938 to 1948.

Locker is best known for her work as a poet, but she did not begin writing poetry until she was 42 years old. Subsequent collections included Du ("You") in 1932; Shtet ("Cities"), about London, in 1942; and The World Is Without a Protector: 1940–1945 in 1947.

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. 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.

She died in Jerusalem in 1990, at age 103.