Yona Wallach

Yona Wallach (; 10 June 1944 – 26 September 1985) was an Israeli poet. Her surname also appears as Volach. She is considered a revolutionary Israeli feminist and post-modernist.

Wallach had written poetry from a young age. Her work was influenced by Jewish mysticism. Throughout her life, she struggled with periods of drug addiction. She began receiving critical acclaim in the late 1970s.

Wallach developed breast cancer in 1981 and refused treatment for two years. She died in 1985.

Biography

Early life Yona Wallach was born on June 10, 1944, in Kiryat Ono, Israel. The name Yona was given to her in memory of three deceased relatives. She was expelled from Tichon Hadash high school after tenth grade, and then spent a short time at the Avni Institute of Art and Design.

Psychiatric hospitalization and sexuality Wallach experienced multiple mental breakdowns, the first one occurring in her late teens. At the psychiatric hospital, she underwent psychedelic therapy. Her doctor, inexperienced with dosage management, nearly caused a fatal LSD overdose during one session.

At 24, Wallach was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a second time, where she remained for four and a half months. During this period, Yona Wallach relied on her financial support from Rachel and did not maintain steady employment. In 1974, Yona attempted suicide and declined hospitalization afterward.

Yona Wallach began performing her poetry with a rock band she formed with two musician friends, though they insisted she recite rather than sing her poetry, as she struggled to stay in tune.

Literary career

Wallach knew from a young age that she wanted to be a writer. When she was kicked out of school in the tenth grade, the headmistress cited Wallach as having neglected her studies in preference to doodling and writing poems. Hurvitz submitted the poem for her to the literary magazine. In the following months five more of her poems had been published in various magazines and periodicals, and her name was mentioned in Ha-Boker as an "important young Israeli avant-garde poet." Her 1976 volume of poems, Shira, received instant acclaim. She was unanimously accepted into the Tel-Aviv Foundation for Culture and Art and won three literary prizes between the summers of 1977 and 1978.

Books in Hebrew

Things, Achshav, 1966 [Devarim] Two Gardens, Daga, 1969 [Shnei Ganim] Collected Poems, Siman Kriah, 1976 [Shirim] Wild Light, Echut, 1983 [Or Pere] Forms, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1985 [Tzurot] Appearance, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985 [Mofah] Selected Poems 1963–1985, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1992

Books in translation Selected Poems, English: New York, Sheep Meadow, 1997 Wallach, Yona, and Zisquit, Linda. Let the Words : Selected Poems / Yona Wallach ; Translated by Linda Stern Zisquit. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2006. Individual poems have been published in: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish.

Awards awarded by the Municipality of Holon (1978)