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In her poem ‘Hebrew,’ which host Marcela Sulak reads, Yona Wallach calls the Hebrew language a “sex maniac” because all nouns have a gender:

“She wants to know who’s speaking
almost a vision almost an image
what’s forbidden in the whole Torah
or at least to see the sex
Hebrew peeks through they keyhole.”

Wallach was born in 1944 in Tel Aviv and never travelled outside Israel’s borders. Eleven collections of her poetry have been published during her lifetime and posthumously, and many of her songs have been put to music. She also wrote for and joined a rock band. Though she died in 1985 of breast cancer at the age of 41, she is still very much present in Tel Aviv.

Never one to shy away from controversy, her provocative (some would say pornographic) poem ‘Tefillin’ created a public storm and ruined her close friendship with fellow poet Zelda. Wallach certainly had an astonishing impact on Hebrew literature during her short life, ushering in a feminist revolution in Israeli poetry and revolutionizing literary Hebrew to include the sounds of the twentieth century.

Text:
Yona Wallach, Let the Words: Selected Poems, translated by Linda Stern Zisquit. The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006.

Music:
‘Ayala’ by Yona Wallach. Performed by Alma.
‘I couldn’t do anything with it’ by Yona Wallach. Performed by Ninet Tayeb.