Lessie Sachs

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Lessie Sachs (1897–1942) was a German-born American poet and artist. She was born in Breslau, then in the German Empire, as the only child of neurologist Heinrich Sachs. She studied arts and crafts in Breslau and Munich, and she published poems in magazines and newspapers, including Simplicissimus and the Vossische Zeitung; some of her poems were set to music and broadcast on the radio.

In 1933, Sachs married Austrian composer and pianist Josef Wagner, and they had a daughter named Dorothée. She was Jewish, and in 1939 she and her family moved to the United States, settling in New York. Some of her work appeared in Aufbau, a New York newspaper for German-Jewish readers.

Sachs was also an artist. At least one of her drawings was published in the fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten (The Orchid Garden) in 1919. She died in 1942. In 1944, her husband published a collection of her poems, Tag- und Nachtgedichte (Day and Night Poems), with a foreword by Heinrich Mann. Her papers, including manuscripts and correspondence, are held by the Leo Baeck Institute.