Yona Wallach

"I weep and strive, strive and weep"

"They draw from each other life and brain remain like burnt out eyeholes long and empty surrounded by lines markings contours of what was once life"

"The hypnotist was here she spoke of the body tired from all the years serving and doing things for us and I went out from the body and sat on the edge of the bed looked at it and climbed up to lick it stroke it take care of it."

"Place a large dam by the wellsprings of the pain gather with it like water watch over it so it doesn't disperse for it is your life."

"My body was wiser than I its ability to suffer was less than mine it said enough when I said more"

"and that's not what' ll satisfy my hunger no that's not what 'll ease my mind no that's not it."

"Yona Wallach was one of Israel’s most important poets and had a profound effect on Israeli culture. Wallach's poetry is characterized by breaking conventions regarding gender, sexuality, and religion, among others."

"The revolutionary poet who paved the way for the poets of the 1980s was Yonah Wallach. She dared to present a provocative woman with blatant sexuality and expressed a wounded and rejected female soul which turned towards madness and mystery."

"...the most cosmopolitan artist that Israel ever produced without ever having gone out of the country. She preceded her time in her intuitions, with no terminology, in understanding and phrasing cultural, social and political processes."

"The iconoclastic poet, the most eccentric and colourful that Israeli literature ever knew"

"Though Wallach died in 1985 at the age of forty-one, her work still exerts a major influence not only on poets writing in Hebrew today but also on the Israeli cultural imagination."

"She lived close to the senses and wrote often of the ruthlessness of poetry as a way out of the inner chaos. "I saw that I haven't a defense. That's what rescued me...that's simply life itself...I don't live without poetry. Poetry is natural bread. You also need music. But what saved me was the need to understand life. The thinking about life saved my life. I wanted to decode for myself what I saw, the riddle of the world. That's the way I wrote my understanding.""

"Yona Wallach, beyond immersing herself in the immediate and palpable, evokes a near-hallucinatory world of the inner self. She rejects any suggestion of influence from the Hebrew tradition. "I hated Hebrew poetry and literature. It seemed like one big deception. I loved Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. It seems to me that Hebrew poetry misses the point...it conceals everything from us. They didn't speak to us about suffering. They spoke about Bialik, that fat self-satisfied man adored by the entire nation, but they didn't speak to us about madness. Everything was fat, everything was national...I hated Shlonsky and Alterman and all the poetry. I hated Amichai..." And although Dahlia Ravikovich, one of Israel's leading confessional poets and Wallach's contemporary, has used Biblical echoes of spoken Hebrew to dramatize personal struggles, even distorting the sacred to mythologize the self, much of her early lyrical poetry is characterized by classical restraint, Biblical conciseness, and female stereotypes. Wallach dismissed her, saying: "Dahlia isn't involved enough with sex. She's not revolutionary enough...She isn't a feminist.""