Yona Wallach o la llum salvatge

Abstract

Although it may be unnecessary to place Yona Wallach in the frame of a specific country or of a given time in order to appreciate her poems, it can nevertheless be useful to give the reader some essential biographical data that may in some degree allow him or her to understand more deeply the despairing cry in Wallachs poems. Yona was born in Kfar Ono, a suburb of Tel-Aviv on the 10th June 1944. Her father, Mikhael Wallach, was killed in Israels War of Independence in 1948. To honour his heroic death, a street in Kfar Ono was named after him.The memory of her father, converted into a myth, is one of the most active elements in Yona Wallachs poetry. She was an awkward adolescent, full of problems with her mother and driven by ambivalent sexual tendencies. She refused to finish high school, but studied art in Tel-Aviv at the Avni Institute of Art in 1961. At the same time, she wrote poetry, for which she had had a passion since reading Walt Whitman at thirteen. Among the events that marked her life, we should bear in mind that during the winter of 1964, the year in which her first poems were published, she committed herself to a psychiatric hospital owing to her symptoms of phobia and hallucination. While still very young, she had an abortion (see the poem «Absalom» in relation to the ambiguous feelings prompted by that incident). In the early sixties Yona Wallach became part of a group of avant-garde poets seeking new directions in the formulation of Israeli poetry. The group formed around Wieseltier and included Hurwitz, Shabtai, Shammas, Someck, Silk, and others with whom Yona maintained deep literary relations and shallow love affairs. She was hospitalized again in 1972 following a suicide attempt. In December 1982, doctors diagnosed the breast cancer that was to lead to her untimely and painful death in September 1985. She was 41 years old, like Rachel, the famous poetess (1890-1931), of whom she came to believe in all sincerity that she was the reincarnation.