Margareta "Minna" Flake (née Mai; November 27, 1886 – February 12, 1958) was a German born physician and socialist who fled Germany during World War II and settled in New York City.
Early life
Margareta Mai was born on November 27, 1886, in Würzburg in the German Empire. She was the youngest of four children born to David Mai, a Jewish grain merchant, and his wife, Berta Mai.[1]
During the Weimar Republic, she was considered Jewish by the Nazis and was dismissed on April 19, 1929. Four years later on April 8, 1933, she was arrested by the Gestapo on charges of hiding Nazi opponents and performing abortions.[1]
Upon her release from custody, and that of her politically active daughter from juvenile custody, she fled Germany via Switzerland and Czechoslovakia to France in May 1933 along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Serge, André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Germaine Krull.[1][6] Lacking her diplomas and work permits, she could only find occasional work and semi-legal practice in Paris and "remained militantly anti-Nazi."[1] In 1941, she left France with her family on a cargo ship bound for New York, arriving in New York, via Martinique, on May 29, 1941.[1] She was admitted to medical practice by the state of New York in 1951, where she became a citizen in 1952.[2][7]
Personal life
In 1907, Minna married German writer Otto Flake (1880–1963), with whom she had a son, Thomas Flake, who was born in 1908. They marriage lasted until 1911. In 1917, she had a daughter, Renate "Renée" Miriam Flake, with German-French writer and essayist, René Schickele,[8] a former colleague of her husband who she met in Florence in 1907.[8]
Flake died on February 12, 1958, at Beekman-Downtown Hospital in New York City, leaving a daughter and two grandchildren.[2]