O the Chimneys

The poet Nelly Sachs was born to a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. Because of ill health, she was largely educated at home and in her youth dreamed of becoming a dancer. When she was fifteen, she was deeply affected by the work of the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf and struck up a correspondence with her. This correspondence lasted for thirty-five years and saved Sachs’s life; in 1940, Lagerlöf interceded with the Swedish royal family on Sachs’s behalf, and Sachs and her mother were able to flee to Sweden, where they settled. Although Sachs had received little recognition for her poetry prior to taking refuge in Sweden, following the war, she became one of the foremost Jewish poets still writing in German. In 1966, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded jointly to her and S. Y. Agnon.