In this fascinating study, Zafira Lidovsky Cohen presents the first full-length critical analysis in English of the works of maverick Israeli poet Yona Wallach (1944-1985). Although Wallach is often remembered only for her outrageous and unconventional personality and the controversies engendered by her sometimes shamelessly erotic verse, she is nevertheless regarded by many of her friends and colleagues as the most important among the Israeli poets of her generation— perhaps even the greatest Hebrew poet of modern times. She has had a profound effect on Israel’s cultural life ever since her works began to appear in periodicals in the early 1960s. As Cohen demonstrates, her poetry is rooted in the poetic revolution in Israel during the 1950s and in many ways epitomizes the literary climate of her time. It also reflects the cultural crises that shook the academic world of the 1960s and the intellectual battles many artists fought with the “prison-house” of semiotic systems in which the human mind, they felt, was entrapped. Mysticism, religion and prophecy, passion, genius, sex and madness are only some of the terms associated with this woman and her unique poetic art, which one critic has called a “unique combination of elements of rock and roll, Jungian psychology and street slang, break-neck pace and insistent sexuality.”
Cohen first presents an overview of Wallach’s short life and surveys her critical reputation. Then, drawing on her own rich and varied background in Bible, mythology, Hebrew language, and Poststructuralist and Postmodernist literary and linguistic theory, Cohen traces Wallach’s poetic corpus, translates and interprets representative examples of her works, and situates the within a variety of historical and literary contexts.