Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman: The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach 0878204547, 9780878204540

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Monographs of the Hebrew Union College Number 30 "Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman n The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach

An I Edward Kiev Library lbundation Book

1 Edward Kiev fuundation Volumes

Benny Kraut, From Reform judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler Alan Mendelson, Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria Raphael ]ospe. Torah and Sophia: The Life and Thought of Shem Trw ibn Falaquera Richard Kalmin, The Redaction Of the Babylonian Talmud: Amoraic or Saboraic Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence ofjewish Scholarship in American: The Publication of the jewish Encyclopedia Philip Millet; Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia:joseph Solomon Lutski's Epistle of Israel's Deliverance Warren Bargad, Tr) Write the Lips ofSleepers: The Poetry ofAmir Gilboa Marc Saperstein, "Your Voice Like a Rams Horn ": Themes and Texts in Traditional jewish Preaching Eric L. Friedland, "Were Our Mouths Filled with Song": Studies in Liberal Jewish Liturgy Edward Frarn, Ideals Face Reality: jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550-1665 Ruth Langet; To Worship God Properly: Tensions Between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in judaism Carole Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia Shaul Bat; A Letter That Has Not Been Read: Dreams in the Hebrew Bible Eric Caplan, From Ideology to Liturgy: Reconstructionist Worship and American Liberal judaism Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen, "Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman": The Poetry and Poetics of Yon a Wallach

{{Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman n The Poetry and Poetics of Yona Wallach

Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE PRESS CINCINNATI

2003 by the Hebrew Union College Press Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

©

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen, Zafrira Lidovsky. "Loosen the fetters of thy tongue woman": The poetry and poetics of Yona Wallach / Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen. p. cm. - (Monographs of the Hebrew Union College; no. 30) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-87820-454-7 Calk. paper) 1. Wallach, Yona-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Poetics. :), Hebrew poetry-History and criticism. l. Title. II. Series PJ5054.w26Z63 2003 892.4'16--dc21 2003040730 Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America Typeset by Posner and Sons Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel Distributed by Wayne State University Press 4809 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201 Toll-free 1-800-978-7323

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: "I Get a Picture of a Most Powerful Person" 1. The Rise of an Israeli Cultural Legend

6

Wallach's Life Story Wallach's Poetic Corpus: A Survey The Study of Wallach's Poetics

2.

On Language and Signification: Wallach's Self-Reflexive Poems 24 Revealment and Concealment in Language To Be Precise with Words 'flY.)) P)1J Words are Nature o,'m, in

3.

From Direct Observation to Indirect Evocation: Wallach's Early Work

44

Yona Wallach and the Poetics of the 1950s Lota Combs her Hair ll'ith a Monkey Wrench n\»), ThL]! are Kids and I'm Yonatan )l'l))) Cornelia and the Devil n)')1)j? When I look in the Mirror )N1J n,::mtm »)NV::> There is Another Sex 'rl)Vr.l1P 1''t)

4.

Testing the Boundaries of the Self: Wallach's Confessional Poetry Yona Wallach and Hebrew Poetry of the Sixties and Seventies

If a Sun or a Moon Your Thoughts n1' )N Vr.llll ON I Didn't Get to Finish My Son Avshalom O)'IlIJN

My Ship Ought to be Described as One Of a Kind O'r.llll ,0' )n The Unconscious Unfolds Like a Fan n!l»)r.l )r.l::> nnn!l) i11::>n nn We Were Like Lunatics 0)!l1)\)r.l::> ))))j1) Over There There is lZfe Ill' Dill

72

5.

Masking and Unmasking: Female Images in Wallach's Early Poetry Historical Background: Feminism Under Siege The Projection of Female Victimization in Wallach's Early Work

105

Nizeta is Something that lfJUre Burning to Devour illJt') Teresa Carefully Welds Around [Jer lUouth min I'm a Fog in a Pan il)'OO A Siren ill a Sad Sea n»))i)Oil

6.

The Poetics and Politics of Wallach's Erotic Verse Sexual/Textual Politics of the Seventies

132

I'm Light and You're a Sample 0')) ')I!.I Come to Me ,'''!In Come to Me Like a Policeman I'mnl!.lJ Come to Me Like a Judge \:)!))I!.I )Y.lJ 'n'N :lJI!.I' N):lnI!.lJ Come to Me Like God om'N )Y.lJ 'n'N :l:JI!.I' N):lnl!.l:J Come to Me Like My Father 'n'N :l:JI!.I' N):lnl!.l:J Once Agaill You Slept with Mr. Bitter Man mmN

7. Whose Voice Is It Anyway: The Dismantling of Mental and Social Systems in Wallach's Later Work

173

I Write My Self in the Annals of Time 0'))) i'ON' 'n:J!lil These are Not My Feelings il')1!.1 m)Y.l1til,il')1!.I OY!l Hebrew is a Sex-Maniac n)i:lV Sleeping Beauty, Scheherazade, The Little Prince, (and Other Tales) :lnn lnn

Everybody is Afraid of This Voice This is the Historical Voice O'I!.I'N

8.

Yona Wallach Pulled By Her Own Strings

217

A Child of Pictures a Child of Visions O"nil "N The Masks that Come Off the Face and Fall Down m1i)'il mJOY.lil To Live at the Speed of the Biography il'!lNi))':lil mimY.l:l m'n, Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue iym n:l) O"Nil

Bibliography

247

Index

259

For Leonanl Jordan, and Evan

The I. Edward Kiev Library Foundation In loving memory of Dr. 1. Edward Kiev, distinguished Rabbi, Chaplain, and Librarian of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, his family and friends established a Library Foundation in September 1976 to support and encourage scholarship in Judaica and Hebraica. The Hebrew Union College Press is proud to add this work by Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen to the growing list of scholaclyworks supported by the Kiev Foundation.

Acknowledgments My study of Yona Wallach's poetry, the subject of my doctoral dissertation and this book, has been a long and remarkable experience. I cannot remember what drew me to her bewitching work in the first place. Was it the enigmatic personae of her early poems and their surreal experiences? Was it the power of the pictorial imagery she concocts? The feminine plight she renders and her humanist agenda? The complexities of her poetic expression and its postmodernist overtones? Her ability to ingeniously imbue ordinary Hebrew language structures with new life, logic, and signification? What I do know, however, is that Wallach's wisdom, honesty, integrity, and courage have been an ongoing source of inspiration for me. lIer buoyant spirit has guided me every time I have faced daunting emotions of weariness, powerlessness, and failure. Within her poetic lines I have always found words of encouragement when the task at hand appeared, at times, unattainable. I am grateful to my mentor, Professor Yael Feldman of New York University, for introducing me to the world of Israeli women's literature and encouraging me to study Wallach's poetry in particular. I am most thankful for Professor Feldman's enduring confidence in my academic abilities and for the way she has allowed me to develop my own critical approach. Her high standards, as evinced by her teaching and by her own many published studies, continue to serve as my ideal as I pursue my academic endeavors. Heartfelt thanks goes to my dissertation committee: Professors David Engel, Baruch Levine, and Perry Meisel of New York University and Professor Stanley Nash of Hebrew Union College for their support and kindness. I am greatly indebted to Professor Meisel for introducing me to the fascinating worlds of Postmodernism and Deconstruction and particularly for his most valuable comments and suggestions, which guided me in revising my doctoral dissertation. Above all, I am deeply indebted to Hebrew Union College Press. Special thanks go to the two anonymous readers of the proposed manuscript whose astute observations I found so helpful. I am grateful to Professor Michael Meyer, Chair of the Publications Committee, for his faith in my work and to Mrs. Barbara Selya, the managing editor, for her graciousness, her keen eye, and wonderful editorial sensibility. I am ix

x

"Loosen the Fetters

(~lThy

Tongue, Wr)marz"

grateful as well to the I. Edward Kiev Library Foundation for its generous grant to HUe Press in support of my books publication. This study could not have possibly taken place without the encouragement of my many colleagues and friends at Stern College of Yeshiva University. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Stern's Dean, Dr. Karen Bacon, and to Dr. Ephraim Kanarfogel, Chairman of the Department of Jewish Studies, two outstanding individuals, for their kindness and for their ongoing support of my work. I thank them also for granting me the Billie Ivri Faculty Incentive Research Award, which helped bring the book to completion. Special thanks go to the Stern College librarians: Professor Edith Lubetski, Stephanie Gross, Elinor Grumet and Vivian Moskowitz. They are the best! I also thank Alice Fasano of New York University's Writing Center for her meticulous reading and editing of the first draft of the manuscript and for helping me master the complexities of English grammar and composition. Next on my list of thanks is Professor Menal)em Perry of the publishing house Hakibbutz Hameuchad, who graciously granted me permiSsion to include the poems of Yona Wallach in their original Hebrew. I also thank the Israeli artist Iris Kovalio, whose dazzling portrait ofWallach decorates the cover of this book. My final expression of gratitude goes to my family. This book is dedicated to my dear husband Leonard for many wonderful years of unfettered love, friendship, and compassion and to our two brilliant sons, Jordan and Evan, who for years kept wondering what was Mom doing at home for so many years and with so much "free" time. Last, but not least, my heart, love, and admiration goes to my precious mother, Maika Lidovsky, and late father, Arieh Lidovsky Z"L, for a lifetime of boundless love and devotion to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and to the State of Israel. Their untold life story is one of many painful struggles and silent triumphs. Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen New York, July 2003

Introduction

I Get a Picture of a Most Powerful Person 1 To all who knew her, Yona Wallach passed through this world like a "living thunderbolt."2 Regarded by many of her friends and colleagues as the most important among the young Israeli poets of the 1960s,3 perhaps the greatest Hebrew poet of modern times, or even since biblical 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. Mysticism, religion and prophecy, passion, genius, sex and madness are only some of the terms associated with this woman and her poetic art. A leading female voice in male-dominated Hebrew poetry,' she is equally remembered for her abrasive and extravagant personality.6 Yona Wallach is a household name in a country where poetry reading is not widespread. She is the only writer of her time whose life and death were documented in a sensational and instantly best selling biography.' This critical study seeks to introduce, describe, and evaluate Yona Wallach's poetry within a variety of historical, literary, and political contexts. Known for its "unique combination of elements of rock and roll, Jungian psychology and street slang, break-neck pace and insistent

1. Yona Wallach, "mlr.ln" m"D:m" (I Get a Picture), Shira, 131. 2. Hilit Yeshurun, in Kat Ha-Ir Yerushalayim, Sept. 26, 1986, in a discussion commemorating the one-year anniversary of Wallach's death at age 41 of breast cancer. 3. E.g. (;abriel Moked, "The Totality of Experiences and Language" [Heb.J, Yediol, Oct. 11, 1985; Han Shinefeld, "A Clean, Lonely Pain" [Heb.J, Al Ha-Mishmar, Oct. 2, 1995 4. Menal).em Ben, "A Big Miracle Was Here" [Heb], Yediot, Oct. 11,1985. 5. E.g. Avot Yeshurun, "The Year of Yona" [Heb.], Ko/ Ha-lr Yerushalayim, Sept. 26, 1986 6. Heda Boshes, "Death in the Family" [Heb.J. Haaretz, Oct. 8, 1995. 7. Igal Sarna, Yona Wallach: A Biography [Heb.] Oerusalem: Keter, 1993).

1

2

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

sexualitY,"8 her work epitomizes the poetic climate of her time. It reflects a new generations resolve to fend off the stifling social and cUltural conventions of an autocratic establishment and experience the personal freedom that reached and inspired them from far off lands. Empowered by the poetic revolution in Israel during the 1950s, Wallach was obviously influenced by the cultural crises that rocked the academic world overseas and its battles with the "prison-house" of semiotic systems in which the human mind, many felt, was entrapped. Her poetry continually challenges the "laws," the "systems," the regular "order of things," as well as all other constraints by which every aspect of individual existence is controlled, reducing human beings to "midget" personalities or "small animals / afflicted with blind obedience." In her poetry, society produces monsters who are alienated from themselves; "self" is confused with "other;" nobody knows who he or she really is, or what one's own feelings are. As a result, no one is able to have a distinctive identity or speak in his or her own voice. A persistent air of doom hovers over Wallachs works, from "Yonatan," the first poem of her first volume, to the "Man who Discovered Death," a story that ends her last. In between there is much pain and misery, violence and blood, and many "silences" in "a world that is not." Like the Poststructuralists and Postmodernists, Wallach speaks of the tragic paradox of people being close to one another yet far apart, so similar yet so different; of the common language that presents reality to the indiVidual, yet predetermines and totally controls all of ones conceptions. She describes human beings swept in a "flow of mighty waters," living in a ready-made so-called "symbolic order" (Lacans term) that "clothes" them with social images that are external to them but finally alienates them from themselves altogether. She talks about the "brainwashing of the collective Senior" and discusses the mythologies that govern our lives and distort our original selfhood. She argues that in the beginning there was word, that word is the origin of all things, and that it underwrites the full presence of the world. Seeking to unveil and subvert the control of structural systems, but mainly to reinvent a new image of a human being free of determinism and domination, Wallachs work is marked by her tireless quest to find a way out, or a way back, to a desirable state in which she can satisfy her craving to know life and the absolute truth. Twisting the Hebrew 8. Gershon Shaked, ed. , "Yona Wallach," in Hebrew Writers: A General Directory (Israel: The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1993).

Intrrl(lucti()ll

syntax out of shape and taking words out of their conventionalized contexts, her use of language becomes exceedingly vague, and-as some believe-so personal as to become indecipherable. Even though there is nu one single literary theury that can explicate the complexities ofWaUach's oeuvre, this book seeks to dispel the myth that when Wallach died she took the key to her poetry with her to the grave. Inspired by various approaches to the analysis of a poetic text, I use my linguistic and literary competence as a reader to locate the incompatibilities within her text and study their significance.~ For the must part, I find that intertextuallinks playa major role in illuminating much of Wallach's subversive intent in her earlier work. However, many of the ungrammatical digressions in her later poems challenge everything that is already inscribed in language and derive their meaning from the rule-free language of the arcane unconscious. Seeking, as she says, to "open the gates of conSCiousness," Wallach inscrihes in these poems the workings of her primordial mind without any inhibitions. While what appears to Wallach's consciousness is not always wholly intelligible, the exasperated reader inevitably realizes that consciousness is the sale source of her understanding of reality. For Wallach, cognition is not a passive acceptance of existing things hut instead an active forming and intending of the world. And as these poems continue to flow, formless yet melodiously, one hegins to sense and experience the creative power of poetically uttered words and their performative nature. Chapter One of this hook introduces Yona Wallachs life, surveys her poetic corpus, and examines previous studies of her work. Since Wallach's use of language is in the front and center of this study, Chapter Two offers a critical analysis of her meta-poetiC poems. It traces Wallach's struggle with the enduring philosophical question pertaining to the origin of language and words' meanings while highlighting her deep-rooted faith in the inherently natural character of language and its propensity to reveal the essence of things directly. Summarizing the main characteristics of the Israeli poetic climate in the 1950s and early 1960s, Chapter Three seeks to show how Wallachs early poems are designed cunningly to conform to and yet subvert the poetic standards of the time. Mostly short and mellifluous, these poems seem at first merely to present a concrete situation from the external 9. E.g Yury Lotman, Analysis Of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Baron Johnson (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976); Michael Riffaterre. Semiutics of PoetTJ' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Tzvetan Todorov, Symbulism and Interpretation, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

4

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

world for direct observation. Yet beneath the surface a thick web of cross-references imbues each situation and each poem with entirely new meanings. Chapter Four situates Wallachs poetry in relation to her contemporaries, the leading poets of the 1960s. Its shows her affinity with some of her colleagues' adverse poetics of existential harshness as well as with others' flights to a world of tender love and infinite beauty. What distinguishes Wallach's work is her dauntless use of material that seems to be drawn from intimately personal experiences that were previously considered too private and thus taboo. Chapter Five investigates the female image in Wallachs early works. It surveys the development of women's Hebrew poetry and studies Wallach's links with her predecessors. Each of the featured poems portrays a well-known image of female victimization, yet indirectly alludes to an independent woman of valor or a Christian saint. Wallach's well-known preoccupation with sex and violence is the focus of Chapter Six, which examines some of her most impudent poems. Reversing gender roles, viewing men as sexual objects, and speaking of womens sexual fantasies, Wallach introduces to Hebrew Modernist poetry a brand of feminism that rejects the traditional meta-physical dichotomy between masculine and feminine . nuning to Wallach's later body of poetry, Chapter Seven traces Wallachs dismantling of the different mental and social systems that in her view cloud one's individuality and selfhood. Chapter Eight, in turn, focuses on the reconstruction of the independent personality that writes her own life in her own language. Since Wallachs poetic language is the axis of this study, translating her poems has been one of my major challenges and satisfactions. Very few English translations of her works existed when I began to study them. Some translations, not yet published, were offered to me after I had already established my own interpretations. Rather than being a chore, the need to translate Wallach into English has served, for me, as a source of illumination. Being forced to examine her every word has sent me to all the possible sources of her poetic diction. It has revealed to me the depths of her familiarity with the Hebrew language, with its biblical and post-biblical sources, and with the layers of signification that are embedded in this uniquely ancient revived language. Indeed, concentrating on her comprehensive way with words has clarified for me how poetry, as she believed, can be an ultimate tool for the creation of things yet unknown. In the end, I realized that Wallach is a major

Introduction

poetic force in Hehrew literature mainly because she writes words, not ideas.!o To read this poetry is to understand what Martin Heidegger meant when he said that a true poet is one through whom "language speaks."!l

10. Malarme's famous reply to a young poet II. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971). 197.

1

The Rise of an Israeli Cultural Legend A grisly she-bear raised me milk of stars was my main nourishment the first thing that I saw in the days of my life I mean that I can remember was me how can I forget 1

Yrma

Wallach:~

Life Storyl

Yona Wallach was born onJune 10, 1944 in Palestine, where her Zionist parents had arrived as young pioneers in the early 1930s. Together with other immigrant comrades, they built their home on abandoned Arab land now known as Kefar Ono, a small farming village in central Israel, where Wallach lived for most of her life until her death in 1985. Having grown up in a rural area, she considered herself a child of nature. "I grew up in a natural setting, some kind of a virgin land,» Wallach said in a 1979 radio interview, "and I was one of natures things there."3 Yet her childhood in the countryside was far from serene. Losing her father during Israel's Independence War, when she was only four years old, Wallach was one of the young victims of Israel's agonizing history. Still, her early years in the village were fairly ordinary. She excelled in the local elementary school and was an active participant in the community's social life. With the onset of adolescence, however, Wallach began to change drastically and became a defiant teenager. Challenging all

1. Shira, 160.

2. Most biographical notcs in this chapter are from Igal Sarna. Yona Wallach: A Biography [Hcb.] Oerusalem: Kcter, 1993). 3. A radio interview with Iiana Zukerman, June 1979.

6

Ihe Rise ulan Israeli Cultural legend

conventional codes of behavior, she appeared to derive joy and satisfaction from flaunting her outlandish behavior in public. Dressed provocatively in tight blue jeans and male low-buttoned shirts, she willfully assumed an abrasive image, and it was not long before the insular community of Kefar Ono came to regard her as a pariah. Nor, in the late fifties, was Israel's big city ready for Wallach's radical demeanor. Accepted to one of Tel-Avivs most prestigious high schools, her rebelliousness was rejected by most of her urban peers who, at that time, were still conforming to Zionist social conventions. Bright and inquisitive, she was nevertheless far from a model student. After flunking au t of most classes, she was marked a Utroublesome adolescent" and expelled from high school after tenth grade. The teachers of her distinguished school, known for its fostering of many ofIsrael's future cultural "stars," failed to detect Wallach's special gifts. And yet, at 16, rejected but still not dejected, she retained her self-assurance: "All you have to do is look at my face to realize how special I am," she told her mother on the occasion of her being expelled. Although Wallach never graduated from high school or attended college,! she read widely and voraciously local and foreign poetry and prose. She watched every film that was screened in the village's movie theater,' and in her notebooks she continually practiced sketching and poetry writing. At seventeen, Wallach became a student at Avni Institute, a renowned school for fine art in Tel-Aviv, known for its Modernist views. She never became an accomplished artist, but the short time she spent at the Institute exposed her to members of the emerging cultural elite in the big city and their rebellion against Israel's political and cultural establishment. She became acquainted with the modernist works of the leading poetic reformers of the fifties and was deeply affected by their desire to be freed from the shackles ofIsraels literary conventions. Nobody knows exactly when Wallach wrote her first published poems. During her teen years she generally refrained from showing anyone her work, and some of her early attempts to publish failed because she refused to allow any editors reVisions. But she became a frequent visitor at Tel-Aviv's "literary cells" and developed close relationships with a new generation of up and coming poets. The first of Wallach's published works, a poem without a title that begins with the words 4. After her dismissal from Tel-Aviv·s prestigious high school Tikhon Jjadash, Wallach attended a night school for a short while but soon dropped out. '). Wallach's mother was co-owner of the local movie theater.

8

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

"Stones roll down to the river," was printed on January 3, 1964 in the popular literary magazine of the Hebrew daily Yediot A/:laronot. Wallach did not submit it to the editor. Her friend, the poet Yair Hurvitz, did. A second poem, "Avshalom," was published a month later in the daily Ha-Boker. The following April, the literary periodical Akhshav (established especially to create a stage for new literary voices) printed four of her poems under the section "New Faces." Later that month, her name was mentioned again in the literary magazine of Ha-Boker as one of the important young Israeli avant-garde poets. She was not yet twenty and seemingly an instant success with a promising future. Yet her next few years were spent not in creative writing but in personal chaos as she experimented with sex, drugs, and madness. Surrounded in Tel-Aviv by a group of energetic and restless artists, Wallach was known for her colorful temperament. Convinced that she was destined for greatness, she struck all who knew her with her intensity and her frenzied pursuit of every possible human experience, much of which was transformed into the stuff of poetry. She appeared to be reaching for something mysterious that she believed to be embedded within her. Unlike many of her literary acquaintances at the time, Wallach was never drawn to the world overseas as a refuge from a stifling Israeli environment or as a necessary step toward intellectual growth: she never left the country for any period of time. Instead, she was attracted to people on the margins of society, fascinated by any deviant lifestyle and by anybody who challenged the rules, the law, and socially accepted "norms." She often socialized with criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts, homosexuals, and other "societal misfits." Wild, sexy, and outlandish, Wallach was able to charm many of those who crossed her path. The young poets with whom she regularly associated saw in her an exotic Amazon goddess courageously pursuing every imaginable experience regardless of the consequence. She was particularly fascinated by madness, which she regarded as an opportunity to break loose of societal rules, explore her inner self, and the unknown. 6 In her quest for the unknown, she also plunged into Kabbalah and mysticism. It is not surprising that a blend of mysticism and madness would eventually characterize her unique poetic style. 6. In 1964, Wallach checked herself into a mental hospital in]erusalem voluntarily and stayed there for over three months. Her explorations of the unconscious during her stay there are the subject of a theatrical drama by Ron Yeshua, Van Gogh Syndrome (2000).

'fhe Rise of an Israeli Culturall.egend

The young poet, however, was not immediately accepted hy Israel's literary stablishment. The publication of her first collection, iJel'arim (Things), in the slimmer of 1966 and the second one, Shenei Ganim (Two Gardens), three years later (I 969) brought her no critical acclaim, despite her notoriety and the fact that she appeared regularly in various live literary forums, where she read her poems in loud, ecstatic, almost musical, rhythmical tones to huge crowds and was always surrounded by admiring young writers who attentively listened to her forceful and passionate oratory. Wallach was taken seriously only in the mid-seventies, when a new Israeli poetic establishment became interested in resurrecting the works of well known nonconventional poets whose major contributions to Hebrew poetry were no longer questionable. 7 In that climate, her next volume, Shira (Collected Poems), published in May 1976,8 was immediately acknowledged in the literary world. 9 At that time some of her poems were also set to music and performed by prominent Israeli singers. The prestigious Tel-Aviv Foundation for Culture and Art unanimously accepted her into the artists' community and she was nominated for various literary prizes, three of which she won between the summers of 1977 and 1978. In the early 1980s, bubbling with energy, independent, increasingly audacious-and more popular than ever-Wallach saw many of her poems published in various different magazines. The tabloid media followed her every move. Major reporters from daily newspapers, like Yediot AIJaronot and Maariv, interviewed her, and Israel's only TV station was preparing a "Yona Wallach documentary."lo Michal Miron, the journalist who interviewed Wallach for Yediot, in an article titled "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World" Quly 31, 1981), described Wallach's public image: "An unusual individual... semi crazy but poetically ingenious, like a 'wild treasure.'" "Wild" would ultimately become the word most frequently used to describe her.

7. E.g. Haim Gouri, Yonatan Ratosh, David Fogel, Avraham Halfi. and others. R Shira contains all of Wallach's poetry published between 1963 and 1975. The volume includes the poems that were formerly collected in Devarim (1966) and Shenei Ganim (1969). lema'ala mi-Zeh (Higher than That) was first published in Shira.

9. In 1976, Wallach's work was first reviewed in Moznaim (44), the oldest and most conservative literary periodical in Israel. 10. The projecl was canceled when Wallach refused to cooperate with the director. See Sarna, Yona Wallach, 265.

10

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

Wallach's courageous battle with the cancer that was diagnosed in the summer of 1981 , the many interviews she granted to the Israeli press from her sickbed, and the public scandals!! surrounding the publication of her "sacrilegious" poems12 seem to have overshadowed the fact that the bulk of her poetry remained, in the early eighties, locked up in her editor's drawer. Menal:lem Perry, a leading editor at Hakibbutz Hameuchad and well known sponsor of young artists, was a great champion of Wallach's early work, but he became weary of her unwillingness to accept his suggestions regarding her increasingly long, unrestrained verse. Wallach died on September 26, 1985, shortly after he finally published her book Tsurot (Forms). Her last collection, Mofa (Appearance), followed soon thereafter. The poetic diary that concludes Mofa, titled "The Man Who Discovered Death," is a story of a dying narrator who had discovered that time was on his side. The same can be said for Yona Wallach: the years since her death have been clearly marked by a steadily increasing interest in her personality, tumultuous life, and most of all, her poetic art. Yona Wallach's Poetic Corpus: A Survey

Wallach's first published book, Devarim (Collected Poems, 1966), is a unique collection of poems whose terror and whimsy are reminiscent of childhood fairy tales. Presented mostly in concrete "realistic" situations and rendered in a dispassionate narrative voice, the poems feature odd characters, predominantly women, with very exotic nonJewish names (Cornelia, Cecilia, Teresa, etc.)' Their innocent lives turn unexpectedly into terrifying nightmares: children desiring human blood "for dessert" and a child's beheading with a "gladiola branch" (Shira, p. 7); skinless girls (p. 12) and skinless people (p. 18); an immolated woman (p. 13); a girl strangled with a cellophane paper and a red ribbon (p. 14); a gang rape (p. 19); and a madwoman combing her hair with a wrench (p. 21). While the fusion of oppositions-the real with the surreal, the prosaic with the figurative, the banal with the exotic, the colloquial with the

11. Miriam Ta'asa-Glazer, an Israeli Deputy Minister of Education and Culture, publicly denounced Wallach, calling her an "aroused animal." Rel,lOv Rashi, October 8 , 1983. 12. These poems later appeared in Or Pere (Wild Light), 1983.

lhe Rise of an Israeli Cultural Legend

11

poetic-is what gives these poems their initial power,':\ their meaning is never easily decoded, even though Wallach ostensibly uses the language of her place and time. Whether it is the surprising weaving of words ("a little blood to cleanse the honey," p. 7); sentence fluidity ("they cut my head off with a gladiola / branch," p. 7); deletion ("Cornelia / who lacks initiative and must." p. 10); superfluity ("they cut my head with a gladiola / branch and gather my head / with two gladiola branches and gift wrap my head ... ," p. 7); contextual oddities within a single sentence ("Lota took pills/ and now she understands only words," p. 21); or overall cohesion oddities ("Nizeta," p. 16)-the first, heuristic reading of each of these poems presents the reader with unsettling textual ungrammaticality. Compelled to decode them during a retroactive or hermeneutic reading, one ultimately discovers a second and higher level of signification in which the subservient nature of the main character is inverted. 14 For instance, investigators of "Yonatan" Oonathan), the poem that opens Devarim, discover a thick matrix of allusions to spiritually superior martyrs such as Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. Another elaborate composite of symbols and allusions turns "Cornelia" from an innocent victim of the devils sexual urging to a "she-devil" with a far greater sexual appetite than his.' '; "Nizeta," the subject of the ferocious lust of a pathetic character named Frederick (the Barbarian?), is not the nymph/nymphomaniac that her name implies, but a rational and intelligent noblewoman. Or "Lota," depicted as a madwoman combing her hair with a wrench, actually hides under her "cobweb dress" the aggressive nature of the spider and the combative spirit of a creative thinker who is determined to challenge obviOUS attempts to restrain her mental prowess. Rooted in biblical allUSions, ancient mythologies, legends, fairy tales, and esoteric symbols from the realm of fantasies and dreams, the enchanted worlds that Wallach creates lUre the reader into their unique 13. Gahriel Moked, "Poetry as Way for Reinventing Meaning" [Heb.], Proza 10 (October 1976); reprinted in Akhshav 61 (1995): 95-99. 14. See Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 1-22. 15. For an intertexual analysiS of "Yonatan" and "Cornelia," see Lily Rattok, "To Be a Prism and Not Shatter" [Heh), Moznaim 9/61 (1988): 19-22; Yair ~1azor, "You Will Not Find Snow White There" [Heb.J, /ton 77, 175-76 (1996): 24-27; "The Textual Sound and the Flowery Fury: The Role of Yona Wallach in Contemporary Modern Poetry," Modern judaism 16 (1996): 278-89. These interpretations and their authors' conclusions will be challenged later in this book.

12

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

oddities, yet the underlying message becomes increasingly clear. Contemporary language, in Wallach's world, is but a veil over a wealth of invaluable distinctions encoded in language through the ages. Rooted in the properties of our bodies, our senses, and our minds, these observations are dormant in our unconscious and are essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, potentially leading individuals to the supreme wholeness that every human soul craves. This orientation toward wholeness is featured also in "A Few Matters,"16 a separate set of poems aff ixed to Devarim. These poems lack at once the exotic characters of Devarim, as well as its pseudo-romantic lure. Instead, the voice of a pensive first-person female speaker appears and openly proclaims that she is now "ready to try new concepts" (Shira, p. 36). "A woman that lives by a different rhythm" (p. 35), she portrays herself as a spiritual being (p. 34) that sees 1m (splendor), or perhaps even the Zohar (the Kabbalistic Book of Splendor) behind material things (p. 36). Beginning an uncompromising, incessant search of her authentiC inner self (p. 47), the speaker in these poems feels that her present self melts away [imm] (p. 38), and her entire sense of being is transformed (p. 39), while she relies on "better than gold instincts" [:liltr.l D':lm D'IJP)'IJO)'N] (p. 46) to guide her back to her primordial "unified soul," which society systematically dismantles (p. 42). Indeed less enchanting than Devarim, "A Few Matters" nevertheless offers the first glimpse into Wallach's incisive exploration of individuality and selfhood as the "mirror" that appears in the first line of this series (p. 33) opens a mythical door to the poet's subsequent "lonely search for internal identity."17 This search intensifies in "Island Poems 1," a set that appears at the end of Devarim, and "Island Poems 2," which were published three years later in Shenei Ganim (Two Gardens). Succeeding the magical "mirror" of "A Few Matters," "Island Poems" immediately thrusts the reader into a "bright labyrinth" [1N)01):l0] designed to free one from the prison house of rational thought and to introduce a concealed universe of beauty and truth (p. 59). The twelve "Island Poems" are perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing works Wallach ever wrote. Featuring authentic Israeli landscapes such as Jerusalems Mt. Zion churches (p. 61) and the back yard of her rural house (p. 16. Wallach, Shira, 33-46. 17.Jerome S. Bruner, "Myth and Identity," in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 285 .

The Rise of an Israeli Cultural Legend

63), a careful study of 'Island Poems" soon reveals esoteric images from the unconscious to he the key wellspring of Wallach's artistic ingenuity. For instance, in one of the most well known poems from this series, "Ho Sea, Heaven" [0'0'0,0' 1i1] (p. 62), Wallach appears to he entering an exhilarating mystical "lonely sea journey" that communicates in depth psychology the experience of individuation and personal growth. 1H Loaded with ancient symhols of mental purification and spiritual exaltation, this poem also fully exposes a unique individual who is determined to overcome the hurdles imposed hy social norms and discover from within a higher realm of being and her one-of-a-kind [my!! 1n] individual essence. Initially the literary establishment was not enthusiastic ahout Wallach's poetics of a disintegrating conscious self and her increasing employment of "rough materials" such as sex and profane language. 19 In the very first poem of her second book, Shenei Ganim (Two Gardens, 1969), she readily admits going through "rough days" (Shira, p. 75).20 And yet, as Gabriel Moked observes, Shenei Ganim is an important juncture in Wallach's poetry.21 While some of the poems in this collection are as aesthetically pleasing as "Island Poems" and others render more of the surrealist nightmares of Devarim, Shenei Ganim also offers a first glimpse into the multifarious character of Wallach's unfolding poetry and poetics. It presents a vast variety of poetic structures, long (pp. 82-83) and short (p. 76); conventionally rhymed and hroken into traditional stanzaic structure (p. 10'5) next to a modern uninterrupted flow of free verse (p. 95); and fluid sentences (p. 81) that sometimes break even in the middle of the single word (p. 79). Many of these poems seem to flow freely from the poet's hallucinating mind. Sadness and frustration, pain and sorrow, death, sex, and madness hang in the air as the poet attempts to encode in common words unacknowledged, subtle, ever-changing human states of consciousness. Although this hody of poetry is difficult to deCipher, it is nevertheless clear that what moves 18. ]olande Jacobi, Complex, A rchetype, ,~ymbol (N ew Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), 179-89. 19. See, for example, Nissim Calderon, "After Two Gardens" [Heb.], La-MerJ:tav, Nov. 29, 1969. 20. The Hebrew text, "y~mJ. 0'1!!j? 0'Y.l' (rough days." with an accent of the first syllable of each word), is a subtle reference to Israel!> old establishment and its Ashkenazi Hebrew accent. 21. Gabriel Moked, "Poetry as a Way of Renovating Meaning" [Heb.], Proza 10 (1976). Reprinted in Akhshav 61 (1990).

14

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

it as a whole is an individual's frantic attempt to escape a passionless, dull, inauthentic, and inactive existence and transport itself into a far off plane of being "over there" [ov] where there is movement and action [mvn1ni1] (p. 93) and life begins anew (p. 95) for a reborn self (p. 95). Wallach's preoccupation with beginnings, metaphysics, and the supernatural intensifies in "Higher than That," the last set of poems in Shira (pp. 123-174), but begins to don a new face. The title alludes to the famous story by YL. Peretz, known for his incorporation of hasidic themes, and many poems of "Higher than That" also have mystical overtones. 22 Permeated with occult visions, these poems portray, in Evelyn Underhill's words, an individual whose "one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and intangible quest: the finding of a 'way out' or a 'way back' to some desirable state in which he alone can satisfy his craving for absolute truth."23 Mysticism, however, is only one side of "Higher than That." Arguing that "real life is hidden" and scorning people in general who, like "ducklings following their mother," end up confusing her life with theirs (p. 156), Wallach deals in this series with the stock of self-knowledge that lies dormant in the human unconscious (p. 124). Turning inward to explore the "dark, tangled labyrinth" of the soul (p. 173), she attempts to arrive at a place where "private things really happen"-and none other than the individual [\:)1!l 01N] can approach, because it is he alone ['Y.l~)I] (p. 151). In her struggle to liberate the soul from the despotic control of the "wholly Other" and her pursuit of higher states of consciousness and ultimate truths, she explores fantasies and dreams (p. 123), insanity (p. 128), divinity (p. 133), Eastern religions (p. 163), love and sex (p. 142), movies and cartoons (p. 146), ancient mythology (pp. 147-48), and the modern sciences (p. 196). And in her pursuit of inner wholeness she forces the self to split, to shatter into its microcosmic pieces (p. 172), and reproduce itself anew (p. 143), In contrast to the obscure nature of the poems of Shenei Ganim and their decomposing composition, the poems of "Higher than That" are mostly well structured and fairly coherent, in spite of-or perhaps due to-their esoteric content. Wallach's next poetic volume is also reasona22. Note that Wallach's first clear allusion to Jewish mystical concepts appears in "Two Gardens," the last poem of Shenei Ganim (Shira , 120). 23. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development Of Man s Spiritual Consciousness (New York, Meridian, [1910 1 1974), 3.

The Rise of an Israeli Cultural Legend

1'5

ably coherent and generally well structured. Only its main theme is altogether different. Published in 1983, Or Pere (Wild Light) is famous for a set of poems that begin with the words "Come to me ... " or "When you come to ... me like a policemen ... a judge ... my father ... God," in which Wallach proceeds to shock the readers with explicit and taboo sexual fantasies that violate a wide range of social, cultural, and religious rules and customs that are commonly considered sacred. The lechery and callousness of the female voice of these poems are even more striking than their lurid descriptions, particularly the request for violent, painful, degrading acts; "push my head backwards / till I scream in pain ... '"( Or Pere, p. 50); "spit on me ... kick me ... break my teeth ... " (p. 54); "torture me as much as you can" (p. 58). As Lily Rattok argues, it would obviously be a mistake to merely read these poems at face value, or associate any of these experiences with Yona Wallach's personallife. 24 On the other hand, it is inaccurate to simply understand them as a feminist protest against female masochism. Miri Kobovi's assertion that these poems investigate "the ecstasy of self-subordination as the only mode of liberation" is a more plaUSible explanation, yet not for the sake of some need for ecstasy and fervor alone, as she indicates. 2s Rather, self-subordination readily infers the end of imposed subordination and therefore the beginning of a personal freedom of will, which is Wallach's ultimate objective before and after Or Pere. The so-called "pornographic imagination" is a legitimate source of poetic inspiration for this poet, who already in Shenei Ganim argues that "beautiful... soft sentences" are no longer able to arouse the soul from its anesthetic state of being, proclaiming that "hard and thankless materials do much more for me conveying much more desire" [iUiY] (Shira, p. 78).26 24. Lily Rattok, Angel 0/ Fire: The Poetry 0/ Yona Wallach [Heb.] (Tel-Aviv: Hakibhutz Hameuchad, 1997),85-92. 25. Miri Kobovi, "Violence in Yona Wallach's Poetry" [Heb.l, The Eleventh Congress ofJewish Studies, 1994. 26. In a short interview following the publication of Or Pere (Wild Light), Wallach flatly denied any identification of these poems with her personal life, or any suggestion that her poems are morally debased. "In Judaism," she said, "blasphemy is part of the love of God." Ostensibly referring to the abundance of sexual references in the Bible itself, Wallach, therefore, dismissed all the "righteous" protests that followed the publication of these poems, "lcfilin" in particular. "In this country," she said, "things are more important than values or human beings. This is what is now happening in Judaism; things have acquired a superior value." And she continued,

16

"Loosen the Fetters o/Thy Tongue, Woman"

Sexual penetration and sexual release as an act of revelation, original creation, rebirth, and renewal is the theme of "Let the Words" [0"";)' )n], the poem that opens Tsurot(Forms) , Wallach's next volume, which was published in 1985 shortly before her death. Only this time the speaker submits completely and passionately to words: "Let the words act in you / let them be free" (p. 5). Echoing the reverberating Poststructuralist argument that language creates reality, there is nevertheless no evidence in this poem, or anywhere else in Wallach's poetry, to link her oeuvre with the intellectual crises of the twentieth century, particularly its skeptical views vis-a-vis the metaphysical foundations of language. Arguing strongly and emphatically that words "are nature and not an invention," Wallach certainly does not uphold the Poststructuralists' argument that language veils nature and alienates individuals from an authentic existence .27 On the contrary, her argument elsewhere in Tsurot, that "a word in the spiritual realm / restores the proper orderliness of things" (p. 91) affirms that a world of inner experiences, separate and distinct from our concrete reality, is very real to her. The relentless struggle to "lose all that is not nature's way and find / that which is nature's way" (p. 93) so that she would finally be able to draw "straight lines from one trait to another ... like me from myself in a straight way" (p. 111) is the main catalyst of Wallachs Tsurot. In this volume, the poet violently attacks societal hypocrisies, sanctimonious morality, sexual prudence (pp. 12-13, 14, 15), social and cultural biases (pp. 42-43), male chaUVinism (pp. 135-6), and the oppressive nature of common logic and common language (pp. 17 -19)-in short, everything we perceive as the "systematic order of things" (pp. 90-91). Portraying humans as self-made puppets playing a game of survival in a world not of their own making (pp. 99-101), she then attem pts to rid her mind of all preconceived concepts that shaped her world-view since the day she was born and finally listens to the words that arise freely from within and effectively weaves together the story of her authentiC, one-of-a-kind life (p. 105). Wallach's steadfast exploration of personal identity and her plentiful use of free associations as a preferred method of documenting that "The proble m is that it is impossible to raise your head and breathe in this country... eve ry form of expression that advances you from one thing to another is forcibly resisted ... " 27. For an English review of French Poststructuralism, see Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Culture of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, fuucault, Lawn (U rhana: The University of Il1inois Press, 1989).

Ihe Rise

oIan Israeli Cultural Legend

17

inquiry results in poems that become increasingly longer. These poems sometimes appear like the elusive bahble of a mind wholly controlled by words ceaselessly streaming from its unconscious without any rational censor. This tendency grows in MoJa (Appearance), Wallach's second volume. published in 1985 shortly after her death. In this collection, it appears that the poet feels totally free to put in writing any idea or utterance that comes to her mind as it occurs to her. Assuming epic proportions and rendered as dramatic monologues, the exceedingly long poems of MoJa are both counter-epic and devoid of drama. Designed to mimic the monotony and folly of ordinary chatter, they entrap readers in a wearisome environment and wear them down with incoherent lines from an inert mind that speaks in common language but seems to lack all rhyme or reason. The human existence that these drama-less poems encode is essentially aimless and passionless and devoid of creative imagery, of "warmth, color, intimate meaning, values-these things that give personal meaning to life."2H Against this dreary background, nonetheless, one hears throughout MoJa the voice of a determined heroine crying out, like Sophocles' Oedipus, "I must find who 1 am!" and subsequently revolting against her own reality. Tearing the social "masks" down (MoJa, p. 130), turning inward, and exploring eyery atom of her being-body and soul-the poet uses natural sciences, philosophy, psychology, religion, and mysticism in her attempt to "see everything / feel sense ... the living thing from inside" (p. 45), or hear the "perfectly harmonious tunes of the truth" (p. 130) and inscribe "consciousness as it investigates itself... impressing its mental data" in real time (p. 132). The poetic freedom Wallach displays in MoJa is unprecedented in Hebrew poetry. Facing her impending doom, the poet appears determined to solYe the secrets of life and share the process with her readers.29 Like the Poststructuralists overseas who were her contemporaries, Wallach senses the limited human capacity to experience life intimately since most of our deeds, urges, and feelings are controlled by language concepts and mental conditioning. She nevertheless believes, as mystics do, that people are capable of losing this control; that they may suspend both intellect and will and in moments of semi-consciousness or "heightened consciousness" escape the proprieties of the conventional universe and sense their own reality as it is and not the way 28. Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York: Delta, 1991),2.3 29. Tamar Mishmar, 'The Verbal Tyranny Trap" [Heb.J, Maariv, April 25. 1986.

18

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

we are trained to perceive it. 3D Her final poetry is a journey to these moments. Letting "language speak," in Martin Heidegger's words, Wallach "bids the dif-ference [sic) to come" and expropriate her experiencing of the world.31 Language is indeed Wallach's master. The freer she is, it beckons her with its boundless creativity and with deeper insight into the true nature of being. Derived from the hinterland of her mind, her investigative poetry can be viewed as a "disturbing spectacle" or a work of art of a visionary artist who allowed unknown and mysterious powers to act upon her and carry her "on the wings of the night to a more personal destiny."32

The Study of Yon a Wallachs Poetics The first serious study of the complexities of Wallachs poetic art was published in 1976 by Yael Renan of Tel-Aviv University. Attempting to observe "some aspects of Yona Wallachs first poems," Renan skillfully analyzes and interprets some of the poems of Devarim, showing how Wallach manipulates the linguistic medium to concretize feelings and emotions. At the end of her essay, Renan briefly assesses the developments in Wallachs poetry post-Devarim from "concretization and dramatic objectivation" to "traditional lyricism" and identifies the poetry of self that begins to pervade her poems.3 3 Renan's analysis is insightful but limited to only one aspect of Wallach's work. Even though Wallach continued to rock the poetic establishment in Israel and both good and bad critical reviews followed each one of her publications, the next comprehensive study34 of her poetic art was not published until 1990 when Dorit Zilberman's Essays on the Poetry of Yona Wallach, appeared.3 5 A modification of her Master's thesis, Zilberman's book is the first detailed attempt to elucidate 30. Underhill, Mysticism, 167-69. 31. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 189-210. 32. Donald H. Mayo,fung and Aesthetic Experience (New York, Peter Lang, 1995), 85. 33. Yael Renan, "Building Possibilities of Feelings: Aspects in Yona Wallach's Early Poems" [Heb.), Ha-Sifrut 22 (April 1976): 46-54. The essay is based on a lecture Renan delivered at Tel-Aviv University on May 12, 1975. 34. With the exception of two essays on feminist aspects of Wallach's poetry by Lily Rattok, "I Want to Build a Kingdom of Dreams" [Heb.], Hadoar, Nov. 29, 1985; "To Be A Prism and Not Shatter" [Heb.], Moznaim 9/ 61 Qanuary 1988): 19-22.

The Rise ot an Israeli Cultural Legend

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Wallach's difficult and "sometimes odd" poetry. Critical of Renans attempt to provide a plausible system for deciphering Wallach's poems, Zilberman attributes the perplexities of Wallach's work to the "atmosphere of unresolved certainty" that pervades modern poetry as such. Modern poetry in general and Wallachs in particular, she claims, is burdened by "casual and arbitrary" utterances that follow some compositional rules but are unavailable for one plausible interpretation. To resolve that problem, Zilberman selects from the poems she studies the utterances that seem to disturb the comprehension and offers a "scale of probabilities" or "degrees of certainties" as a method for her analysis. 36 In the extended edition of her book, which followed in 1993, Zilberman proceeds to resolve a different aspect ofWallachs intriguing poetry, but the poems she analyzes often remain opaque, especially when she ventures to confront their enigmatic nature.37 Many of Zilberman's readings of Wallach's poems fail to decipher them properly precisely because of her Modernist attitudes and the theoretical confinements she imposes on them. As a result, she can clearly show, for example, "Romantic and Anti-Romantic Motifs" in Wallach's poetry (Chapter One) or effectively design a "Portrait of the Woman in Yona Wallach's Poems" (1993, Chapter Four), but she is still unable to decode one single poem fully. Moreover, significantly absent from her study is Wallach's main contribution to Hebrew poetry, that is, the discovery of the language of the self. 38 Lilach Lachman's article, "Like the Image of the Reason-The Image of the Face-Yona Wallach," is the first notable study that attends to Wallach's later collections (Tsurot and Mola) and attempts to apprehend her corpus in its totality.39 In this article Lachman follows Wallach's mostly lyrical poetry beyond Devarim. She highlights Wallach's poetic evolution, her relentless search after hervery own individuality and selfhood and the linguistically daring possibilities she discovered on that path. To Lachman's credit, she studies Wallach's

35. Dorit Zilberman, Essays all the Poetry o/Yana Wallach [Heb.] (Tel-Aviv: Varon Golan [1990]1993). 36. Zilberman, Essays, 5-7. 37. Cf. Ruth Laufer's similar comments in her review of Zilberman's book in lIon 77, 15H (March 1993). 3H. Cf. Aaron Shahtai, "About Yona Wallach" [Heb], lJadarim 5 (1985/6): 15-20 39. Hadarim 10 (Winter 1993): 143-54.

20

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

poetry from within, not from without, allowing Wallachs own words to guide her from "the I to the self in a straight way" ['~~))7 ,~~))~ ')N "l'iJ'i11"l,J].40 At the close of her essay, however, Lachman contends that Wallachs poetry, albeit unique and revolutionary, should be placed in the context of the "poetic deviations" that are typical of the pop culture of her time. Pointing back to Zilbermans cardinal argument, but referring to Wallachs later work, Lachman argues that in the end Wallachs writing, or in the poet's words "writing about her language that shows in her mirror" [nnN"l~J n'N"lm nn!l'iJ 7)) mm) ],41 loses touch with the external world, and that too much "casualness" makes it incomprehensible.42 Others, like Ariel Hirschfeld, similarly criticize Wallachs later poetry for its tendency to "compulsively repeat the mechanism of 'associative linking of intellectual ideas' consequently losing the ability to signify." Hirschfeld accuses Wallach of senseless talkativeness and intellectual aloofness and, worse, with creating utterances of intellectual pretense that do not correspond to any authentic states of mind that she allegedly attempts to render.43 Hirschfeld wrote this critical essay in response to Hilit Yeshurun's 1992 publication Yona Wallach, Selected Poems 1963-1985. 44 In this anthology, Yeshurun, who does not explain the criteria for her selection, seems to agree that Wallachs early poetry is more noteworthy. She includes much more of it and omits much of the later work. Hirschfeld's main objective, far beyond criticizing Wallachs later poetry or even Yeshurun's selection, seems SUbtly aimed at halting the surge of "Yona Wallach worship" that swept Israel's intellectual elite after the poet's untimely death and threatened to forestall the "objectivity" of the literary "sciences." Gabriel Moked, an exponent of such worship, positioned Yona Wallach "on one of the peaks of Hebrew poetry" and observes the great power in her early "psychedelic" collection as well as in her later experimental poems. 45 Comparing Wallach to her young colleagues who emerged in the 1960s, Moked, a prominent literary figure in Israel, contends that all of Wallach's poetry, from its onset, is "astonishingly 40. Wallach, Tsurot, II I. 41. Wallach, Tsurot, 186. 42. On Wallach's reinvention of an independent self, see also Lilach Lachman, "On the Self in Yona Wallach's Poetry" [Heb.J, ijadarim 11 (Summer 1994): 142-54. 43. Ariel Hirschfeld, "I'll Never hear God's Sweet Voice." Review of Tat Hakara Niftal.zat Kemo Menifa [He b.), Haaretz, Sept. 25, 1992. 44. Yona Wallach, Tat Hakara Niftal.zat Kemo Menifa (Selected Poems J 963- 1985) (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992).

lhe Rise of an Israeli Cultural LeRend

21

beautiful" and that each of her poems is a piece of art worthy of publication. For Menal,1em Ben, another well known literary personality, Wallach was a "prophetess" whose poetic achievements, in his words, "elevated Hebrew poetry to peaks that it has not attained since the Bible."46 Another distinguished scholar, Arieh Zacks, argues, contrary to Hirschfeld, that all of Wallach's poems are poetically authentic: "Wallach never enforced 'poetic' structures on her writing ... through the written lines it is possible to hear a person talking to herself out loud. The voice submits to the attentive listener a variety of feelings ... written by a chaste woman who could never lie."47 Finally, the prominent literary scholar and acknowledged authority on Hebrew poetics Dan Miron defines Wallach as a "great poetic force" that "loosened something in the expression that enabled her to reach far off places."48 It seems that Hirschfeld, who represents a younger generation of literary scholarship in Israel, would agree in the end not only with Miron s cautious statement but also with the overstatements that tout Wallach's major contribution to Hebrew poetics. For in that same article, Hirschfeld readily admits that Wallach's poetry, including what he considers her "weak poems," played a major role in the history of modern Hebrew poetry. Her twofold contribution was, in his view, first in the area of the "meta-poetic concept," and second, in the feminist revolution in Israeli art. The feminist aspects of Wallach's poetry are the centerpiece of Lily Rattok's book Angel of Fire: The Poetry of Yona Wallach. 49 Following some interesting "intertextual markers" that link Wallach to her female poetic predecessors, Rattok associates Wallachs writing with the tender voice of Ral,1.el, the "matron" of female poetry in Hebrew,~o as well as with the belligerent proclivity of the earthly Esther Raab, the mystical explorations of the devout Zelda, and the fiery nature of the eccentric German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schueler. Viewing Wallach as a gallant extension of the exotiC, outlandish landscapes that the poet Dalia Hertz developed in her 1961 volume Margot, Rattok rightly identifies 45. Gabriel Mokcd, "The Totality of Experiences and Language" [Heb.], Yediot, Nov. 11, 1985. 46. MenaJ:lem Ben, "A Big Miracle was Here" [Heb.], Yediot, Nov. 11, 1985. 47. Arieh Zacks, "The Marriage of Eden and HelJ" [Heb.), Haaretz, Nov. 1,1985. 48. Dan Miron, "On Yona Wallach" [Heb.), /fadashot, Nov. 4, 1985. 49. See n. 23. 50. Dan Miron, rounding Mothers, Stepsisters [Heb.), (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1991).

22

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

the desire to escape from hobbling Israeli realities as the main poetic impetus for both Hertz and Wallach. We must bear in mind, however, that attempts to transcend the banalities of life and attain personal and artistic freedom, far from being gender issues, were foremost in the minds of all the Israeli poets who struggled to define themselves in the early years of Israels independent existence. In the context of that (still) unwritten Israeli literary hiStory, one has to conclude, as Hirschfeld does, that the fifties and the sixties were marked by the collapse of the established trajectory that characterized Hebrew poetical history in the first half of the century and the beginning of diverse poetic activities that can hardly be intertwined.51 As the poet Meir Wieseltier contends, once the "ideological despotism" was crushed during the first decade of Israels existence, a new generation of poets found endless options of poetic formulae lemon]. Never ignoring either internal or external influences on the diverse poetic activity of these years, Wieseltier nevertheless emphasizes the spontaneity of the artistic creativity and the discrete wellsprings from which each of the leading poets of those years drew.52 This evidently was also Hilit Yeshurun's sentiment as her literary periodical f:/adarim (Rooms), which featured Wallach's poetry during the eighties, promised to allow every indiVidual poet "a room" of his or her own.53 Lily Rattok's focus on feminist themes deprives Wallach's works of the critical study they merit. Moreover, while stimulated by Postmodernist and feminist agendas, two elusive concepts that she barely defines, Rattoks analysis of the "feminist scope,"54 a major factor in Wallachs poetics of dissent, fails to recognize the canny duplicitous voice that underlay Wallach's representation of the triumphant female. Rattoks pursuit of Postmodernist ideology in Wallach's poetry on the whole is problematic and misleading. For even though many Postmodernist "devices" can be detected in her poems, Wallach, unlike ardent Postmodernist artists, never compromises her search for "authentic" existence or her pursuit of true individuality and genuine selfhood. In fact, these very quests constituted for Wallach the entire meaning of her life and underlay her entire poetic enterprise. 55 These inner quests also 51. Ariel Hirschfeld, "The Question What is a Poem Has Changed Suddenly. What is a Poet? What is a Reader?" [Heb.), Haaretz, Feb. 14, 1992. 52. Meir Wieseltier, "Her Mouth Filled With Blood and She Died" [Heb.), Haaretz, July 9, 1993. 53. The first issue of l:Iadarim appeared in the Fall of 1981. 54. Rattok, Angel Of Fire, 76 .

The Rise a/an israeli Cultural Legend

23

point to two major tools that Rattok fails to consider in reading Wallach's "very personal" (p. 9) poems: 1) The human unconscious as a source of artistic inspiration; 2) The poetic language as a medium of unearthing personal sensibilities that are concealed by the language of standard communication. While overlooking the exegetical powers of psychological theories altogether, Rattok's investigation of Wallach's creative use of language is brief, disseminated, and often inconsistentY' Never explaining how submission to the magical power of words results in original creation, Rattok inexplicably relates Wallachs unique use of language to her Postmodernist style, to her mystical tendencies, to her religious creativity, and to a richly intertextual variety. While confirming Wallach's linguistic resourcefulness, these associations neither explain nor illustrate how "Wallach designs a unique language and a unique world ... "~Rattok is right in her assertion that Wallach practiced poetry as a secret religion. It is also true that writing, for Wallach, was a primordial act, and that her poems are filled with ancient wonder and strange hermetic wisdom. 'iH All this, however, is more of a reason, not less, for investing more time and effort on a formalist reading of Wallach's poems, for investigating their linguistic ingenuity and illuminating their meaning. 59

55. Cf. Hilit Yeshurun, "Yona Wallach April 19H4 - An Interview" fHeb.], Ijadarim 4,1984. 56. E.g. After stating that Wallach, like many other Postmodernist writers, "didn't even attempt to design reality" (l17), Rattok opens her chapter on Wallach's language asserting Wallach's Postmodernist conviction that reality is created by language (I 37) and concludes the chapter by saying that Wallach believed in the power of art to change reality (140). 57. Rattok. Angel oj Fire, 137- 39. 58. Rattok, Angel ajFire, 12-13. 59 Cf. Itzhak La'or, "~o, This Is Not It Yet" [Reb.], Haaretz/Sejarim, Oct. 14, 1997.

2

On Language and Signification: Wallach's Self-Reflexive Poems "The creation of the word creates the world" (Shira, 168)

Revealment and Concealment in Language: A Historical Background Since the rise of modern Hebrew poetry at the turn of the twentieth century, Hebrew poets have proclaimed their frustration with language and words. Following the beliefs of I:Iayyim Nal)man Bialik, the architect of modern Hebrew poetry, poets generally perceive their "working tools," namely words, as nothing but "husks of meaning," and language is but a "sheet of ice" covering the nothingness that is in the heart of human existence.! "My poem is like investigating the abyss," exclaims YZ. Rimon (1881-1958), "it is a zero and nothingness, not real."2 Yearning to experience the essence of things or, in Eliyahu Tesslers (1901-1968) words, "touch the beginning" [11 1VNi:1],3 Yisrael Efrat (1891-1981) provides a powerful portrayal of an anguished poet using words as nails digging mercilessly deep into his flesh in his futile attempt to reach beyond the surface. 4 Years later, the young David Avidan (1934-1998) speaks in his ever-cynical tone of "sadosemanticism," the futile pain a poet brings upon himself as he tries to find an accurate word [0"'0:1 j.)""V Propagating the silence that Bialik in the third part 1. I:J.N. Bialik, "Revealment and Concealment in Language" [Heb.1, in .l.n l~m " P"N':l (The Collected Work ofH.N Bialik) (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1953), 191-93. The English translation by Jacob Sloan appears in Robert Alter, Modern Hebrew literature (Philadelphia: Behrman House, 1975), 130-37. 2. Ruth Kartun-Blum, Poetry as its Own Mirror: An Anthology [Heh] (Tel-AviV: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982),36. 3. Ibid. 66. 4. Ibid. 46. 5. Ibid. 93.

24

Wallach s Self-Reflexive Poems

2'5

of his "Revealment and Concealment in Language" deems the ideal linguistic expression. Avraham Ben-Yitshak (lHS3-1950), one of the key voices of Hebrew Modernism, glorifies all those who "know what their heart calls from a desert / and silence seals their lips."(' Another celebrated Modernist, Yitshak Lamdan OS69-19'54), describes the poet sinking like a "heavy rock" into the depths of himself and "in the silence of no-knowledge [Y1)-W>{] that comes upon him/ he knew only that he'll never know his souL"For the next generation of poets to rise and revolutionize Hebrew poetics during the first decade of Israel's statehood [il))1Y.lil om], it is already clear that words are nothing but "air."!! Displaying a well-known (Post)Modcrnist position on their nature, David Avidan writes: "Poems typically do not reveal/but that which could be said in words / and therefore they throw themselves off a highcliff [pt:f'l1Ni] ... "9 At the same time Dan Pagis (1930-1986), echoing some early predecessors, argues that the "empty page" alone can speak ones own authentic voice. He intimates that all linguistic signs are already coded and that touching the "beginning" [n)'l1NiJ] that Tessler, for example, desires is essentially unattainable in words.I° Similarly, Arnir Gilboa 0914-1984), situated poetically between the second generation of Hebrew Modernists and the first generation of "Israeli Poets," 11 vividly describes the promising beginning of a "run away" poem abruptly shuttered at the "doorway of / a primeval void" [m)'tINiJ 1i1J 1i1n].12 But in the course of some sixty years of poetic creativity in modern Hehrew, one can certainly hear some less deterministic voices. Avraham Shlonsky 0900-1973), for example, the leader of the post-Bialik (and anti-Bialik) wave of Modernism, is determined to "conquer the void."13 In the spirit of Bialiks assertion in the first part of "Revealment and Concealment in Language" that human language has become "like two languages, one built on the ruins of the other," ~oah Stern 0912-1960) 6. Ibid. 44. 7 Ibid. 38 8. E.g. Natan Zach, "The Correct Poem," in Kartun-Hlum, idem. 84. 9. Ruth Kartun-Blum, Self-Reflexive Poetry - furry Years [Heb. J (Tel-Aviv: Hakihbutz Hameuchacl. 1989), 16. 10. Kartlm-Blum, Poetry as its Own Mirror, 94. 11. Warren Bargad, To Write the Lips Of Sleepers: The Poetry Of Amir Gilboa (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994), 2-4. 12. Kartun-Blum, Self-Reflexive Poetryl, 43. 13. Kanun-Blum. Poetry as its Own Mirror, 55.

26

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

evidently believes in a "living" language fortified by subliminal senses,14 while D.B. Pomerantz 0902-1943?) details the transformation of an "external language" and common words into what Bialik calls the "inner language of the poet's soul."J5 At that time, Leah Goldberg (I911-1970) speaks of an "arcane language" formed within a reversed mirror that holds a different reality revealed to the poet alone.J6 For the ever-mystical Yokheved Bat-Miriam (1901-1979), poetry is certainly made of wholly liberated words. In the image of a defiant woman found elsewhere in her poetry, she writes: "A word that comes out / a word that's been said / follows a logical principle and her own will. / She is exact and also different / like the tree and its roots in the ground." J7 Similarly, for Ozer Rabin (1924) the creative process is described as a "descent to the dark cave" where unfettered words "passing feverishly" through the darkness of the cave first break down into pieces then reshape anew "man in his purity" [~mr.m:;) " .P'~l~ 1~( il1)N )Y.lf

Precisely20 A.

Hello, you seem very familiar to me, I lived with you about two years ago 3 I saw you almost every day 4 until your visage was almost erased, ~ when people live together very often (, visage is destroyed, except when 7 a face is particularly festive 8 and you do not have a face like that. 9 You have not changed. Not even the smell. 10 And we met in the same usual place. 1

2

20. "Precisely" first appeared in Shenei Ganim (1969). The same poems were later collected in Shira, 88-89. Some are reprinted in Tat Hakara Nifta/:lat Kemo JUenifa, 74-76.

"loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, lfbman"

28 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

19

At first I did not notice that it was you, I mean I did not notice that something has really changed, in other words as if since then until now we have always been together, until something made me realize my mistake, maybe it is that I called you by your name and it carne to me like new, by itself. Like that (particular) self precisely

At first sight, part A of "Precisely" (Shira, pp. 88-91) suggests a somewhat familiar discourse uttered by a young man who has just run into an old girlfriend with whom he had lived a couple of years earlier.21 It is, therefore, quite surprising that he barely recognizes her even though she has not "changed." It is even more puzzling that his ensuing identification has nothing to do with her most distinguishing feature, her face, but with a set of configurations: the place is "the same usual place," the same enVironment, the same setting, the same background. In addition, he becomes aware of her also because of her very own "smell," not an essential but an associative identification determined by some property of the individual. Evidently, the identification that the protagonist of Wallach's "Precisely" makes is therefore strictly "structuralist."22 The girl is not a distinctly separate essence with her own individual impression, and her presence is affirmed in relation to other components that surround her or are associated with her. She eXists, not intrinSically, as a self, and not positively, by her own qUintessence, but negatively, by her relation to other items in her environment. "I saw you almost every day," the speaker remarks, "when people live together very often / visage is destroyed." Observing the process of cognition, Wallach seems to realize that as presence becomes a routine, perception becomes automatic. We recognize our close friends; we don't really see them. We perceive things that regularly surround us "as if they were enveloped in a sack," argues the 21. Note that the Hebrew grammar clearly identifies a female addressee nN (female "you"). 22. "Structuralist" theory contends that things do not assume their meaning due to any essential characteristics. Instead, every individual thing is defined only in relation to other components that either surround it or are associated with it. See Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 17 - 18.

Wallach:S SelfRefle:dve Fbems

29

Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky. "We know what an object is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette; the object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten."23 In "Precisely," we should notice, the male protagonist is unable to recognize the girl not because of their separation, but precisely hecause of their closeness and the intensity of theirjamiliarity. Furthermore, due to this hand, he first "did not notice / that something has really changed, in other words / as if since then until now / we have always been together ... " Surely, the girl's impression has receded in the man's mind into oblivion, but not forevermore. The state of affairs in Wallach's poem changes dramatically when he is able to call the girl by her name. In everyday use, names, as we know, are meant to identify, to set one person apart from another. In the communicative process, a name may not have any signification. The name luna, for example, would identify the person Yona Wallach, but would not signify any relation to a "dove," which is its lexical meaning. Yet this is not the case in literature, where aside from their semiotic functioning, names may have additional connotative signification. This is clearly the case in the Bible, where the correlation between the name and a person's (or place's) character or destiny is highlighted 24 Furthermore, in the biblical process of creation, as rendered in the book of Genesis, naming is an integral part of the act of creation and/or distinction: "... and God said, let there be light: and there was light... and God called the light Day... " (Gen 1:3). In other words, naming, or the Hebrew NijJ, gives the thing-in-itself its marked identity-that is, its 1m" and like that term's semantic association with the word 1nN (one), it signifies the uniqueness of that thing. In "Precisely," calling the girl by her name clearly results in restoring her individual identity, and the first part of "Precisely" ends with the strong 23. Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian R)rmalist Criticism, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 11-12. 24. E.g. Gen 3:20 "And the man called his wife's name .!:lava, because she was the mother of all living [m I; Gen 11:9 "Therefore is the name of it called Bavel; because the Lord did there confound [,'n 1 the language of all the earth"; Gen 29:34-35 "And she conceived again and bore a son and said, Now this time will my husband be joined em"~ I to me because I have borne him three sons; therefore was his name called Levi. And she conceived again and bore a son and said, Now will I praise limN] the Lord: therefore she called him Yehuda... " See also Hillel Barzel, New Interpretations of Literary lexts: From Iheory to Method 1Heb.1 (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Han University, 1990), 29-:30

30

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

impression of singularity and exclusiveness that is implicated with naming: "it came / to me like new, by itself / like that (particular) self precisely." :l

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The narrative of part B of "Precisely" appears to follow part A perfectly. The speaker seems to argue that he never actually forgot the girlfriend he was barely able to recognize in part A, all the while repeating his argument that proximity and familiarity breed effacement. Yet this ever-romantic statement hardly coincides with the callousness of the speakers initial reaction to the girls presence and the structural process of cognition that restored her identity in his mind. Other subtle inconsistencies pervade the narrative structure of part B as well. The most obvious is the logically irreconcilable assertion of the first two lines: "You were always in me / sometimes without sometimes within ... " (emphasis added). Likewise, the act of "dashing out" [n')i1], commonly associated with a startling appearance, is hardly reconcilable with "you are not startling." Also, it is somehow perplexing to find in the first line the Hebrew compound ') (in me), rather than ':>~n:l (inside me), which would concur better with the end of the third line [':>mY.> (out of me)] as well as with the speaker's entire argument. In literary critiCism, such inconsistencies usually mean that the initial interpretation of the poem needs to be modified, and that most likely a referent external to this text needs to be linked with the poem, augmenting its matrix with extra significance.25 25. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 2.

31

Wallach:s- Self-Reflexive Poems

As .Y1ichael Riffaterre argues, leaping the hurdle of reality and discovering the significance of a poetic matrix is the real challenge of poetry reading. 26 In the case ofthis Wallach poem, the task is formidable since the verbal sequences elegantly veil an elaborated network of references. As a result, the inconsistencies of part B remain virtually unresolved until parts C and D reveal that the underlying issue of the poem is not human relationships but the use of language and the source of words'meanings. )

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Here, the speaker readily concedes that the vivid scene that has been depicted in the first two parts of the poem is in fact an internal discourse and therefore not monitored by rational processes. Never referring to the forgotten intimate affair that seemed to trouble him in the first two parts of the poem, the main argument of part C is that personal inner feelings and emotions can be labeled as one "pleases" through one's peculiar senSibility. The word that the speaker chooses for describing the "unwelcomed feeling" within him, the female first 26. Ibid. 7.

32

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

name Tsipora or the Hebrew lexeme tsipora (bird), is once again enigmatic: a bird is usually associated with loftiness, singing, freedom, and spirituality. It is nevertheless obvious that for Wallach the name is never "arbitrary or casual."27 As her speaker argues defiantly in this part of the poem, a common name/ word, in addition to its general and public signification, can be used to impart a human's private sensation and emotions as they are felt individually from within. 28 Within Wallach's poetic world Tsipora / tsipora is never a positive image. In the poem "Oyoy," which opens the collection Shenei Ganim, Tsipora/ tsipora is a female stifled by old societal conventions,29 and in Wallach's first collection, Devarim, she is the ultimate image of a used, abused, and finally abandoned feminine victim of male sexual indiscretions. 30 "Precisely" is hardly a feminist manifesto, but the underlying "unwelcomed feeling" that the speaker of this poem identifies is similar to previous references to tSipora in Wallach's oeuvre. It is the feeling of growing meaninglessness, of being smothered by conventions that ignore human feelings and emotions and devalue the individual. The realization that, for Wallach, a name or a word that is casually used from without can bring back to life veiled inner meanings that are unique to one's personal experiences finally resolves the riddle that still lingers in part B of "Precisely." Evidently the grammatical subject of the statements "you were always in me / sometimes without sometimes within .../ you are not startling" etc. is not the assumed girl after all, but rather the word that by its uttering made "it" reappear "like new, by itself" (part A).31 This interpretation is reinforced when one realizes that the common present-day Hebrew word for "word," nJ)y') , appears in the Bible in poetic texts onlY,32 often with the sense of an external manifestation of the life-giving spirit of God that speaks from within mankind. 33 In addition, turning to part 0, it finally becomes clear that in spite of its pseudo27. Zilberman, Essays on the Poetry of Yon a Wallach , 8. 28. Note that the root of the Hebrew verb p'On!m (please, desire), p-'O-n, is etymologically linked to the semantic field of close attachment and in modern Hebrew commonly signifies whimsical desire. 29. Wallach, Shira, 75. 30. "See How The Bird [tsipora I Is Doing," Wallach, Shira, 26. 31 . Note that the Hebrew i1"y') (word) is a feminine noun. 32. The common biblical word for "word" is ')1. 33. E.g., 2 Sam 23: 1-2 "l))'O"Y \l'1,m 1) ,:n tl1i1'N m," (fhe spirit of the Lord spoke in me and his word is on my tongue).

33

Wallach S SelfRefle.Yive Poems

romantic lure, the subject of "Precisely" is language, and language alone. 1

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The word loneliness is hard to say. When desire is satisfied it is dismissed. Unless the magnitude of its claim is ingenious. The feeling contains its destruction. As opposed to the verb, the adjective is the stability of the feeling. Suddenly it can go on_ Therefore it is better to use the verb to mark the feeling and that's what was hard for me.

While the opening lines of this part of "Precisely" still suggest the discourse of a human love affair gone wrong, it is nonetheless clear that Wallach now confronts her subject matter directly_ The repeating

34

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

syntactic structures that are noticeably impersonal and passive 34 suggest that unlike the insubordinate and rebellious free spirit encountered in part C, the speaker in part D is burdened by the language he uses. The issue, as Wallach forcefully argues elsewhere, is that grammatical structures that are artificially and arbitrarily imposed on language imperiously imprison its speakers in a world predetermined by those structures. 35 In part 0 the problem specifically seems to be that the "system" makes it impossible to render feelings in real time as they occur and, therefore, it may look as though in the end the speaker realizes that he is unsuccessful in his attempt to be preCise, or that he is unable to go beyond signification and grasp the thing as it occurs.36 This, of course, could have been a plausible conclusion of this part had it been an independent poem. As we have seen, beginning with part A, the speaker of "Precisely" notices that even though everything close and familiar tends to fade into oblivion, "naming" (part A) brings the object back "like new, by itself. / Like that (particular) self precisely" (emphasis added). This is argued again in part C when the speaker asserts that "there is no shame in speaking to oneself as long as / you call everything by its right / name ..." (emphasis added). In part C the speaker argues further that he is free to name any feeling "as I please." In other words, he is not burdened by the "system" that he allegedly is set to "investigate" in part D, and certainly feels that he can render his feelings as they occur by bringing out a word that defines that feeling precisely. To settle these conflicting arguments within the different parts of "Precisely," we must recognize, as Wallach does, that language powerfully influences the way people perceive and adjust to the world outside them. But language is not only a key: it can also be a fetter, limiting perception and thoughtY This, in turn, is what "was hard" for the speaker in part D (emphasis added). Yet, neither in "Precisely" nor elsewhere can Wallach's voice be associated with a typically postmodern passivity and resignation. We cannot conclude, as David Gurevitz does, that 34. "It is impossible" (line 0; "it is very distressing" (line 2); "there is a need" (line 3); "the word loneliness is hard to say" (line 5); etc. 35. On Wallach's struggle with the "system," see "Hebrew" in Tsurot , 16-17. The poem is translated and analyzed in Chapter Seven of this book. 36. See, for example, Zilberman, Essays, 8. 37. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), 127.

Wallach's 5;clj-RejZc.l:il'C Poems

35

"Wallach knows that words ha\'e a long history and that their meanings are determined by context only."\H Even though she often observes that the common language that presents reality to the individual also predetermines and totally controls one's conception, Wallach always proceeds to uncover yet another language, an internal and eternal one, in which words are not dissolvable signifiers but symbolic pictures that spring from within and allow for poetic creativity and individual expression. 39 Part D of "Precisely" comes to finally settle this separation in a proper manner, It is, furthermore, an "open investigation," in which the grammatical structures of the language are blamed for hindering the speaker's expressiveness, not the individual words or the language per se. 40 What is indeed "hard" for this poetic voice is precisely the fact that its expressive tools are already coded, Yet it remains convinced that what is revealed from without conceals yet another world of hidden wisdom and profound knowledge, Rendering some of her predecessors' faith in the power of words, Wallach's "Precisely" nevertheless is an unprecedented poetic matrix that confronts philosophically enduring questions regarding the nature of language and the source of words' meanings, Against David Avidan's and other Modernists' gloom, Wallach systematically battles the numbing effects of conventional language, believing that words can escape the constraints of their conventional meanings from without to reveal their very own individual essence from within, Contrary to Modernist (and Postmodernist) skeptics, she exposes a deeply-rooted belief in the so-called "magical" powers of words ("there are words / that are hard to say .. '; the word lonely is hard to say"),41 and a strong affinity for great Romantics like Walt Whitman,42 for whom all words were spiritual, and Victor Hugo, who asserted that "Ie mot, qu'on Ie 38. David Gurevitz, Postmodernism: Culture and Literature at the End of the Twentieth Century [Heh.] (Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1997), 155 39. Cf. I:I.N. Bialik's contention in his essay "Revealment and Concealment in Language" (n. 1): "... the human language has become two languages ... one an internal language, that of the solitude and the soul-the domain of poetry; the other the external language, that of abstraction and generalization-the domain of logic." 40. See also the end of "Hebrew" (Tsurot, 19) where Wallach writes: "I love her I language I now wi thout language covering I11'l1' mO:l J," 41. The magical approach to meaning maintains that there is an intrinsic association between the word and its referent and that words have the power to affect reality. See c.K. Ogden and LA. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (San Diego: A Harvest/HBJ book, 1989), 24-47. 42. According to Igal Sarna, Wallach read Shimon Halkin's translation of Whit-

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

36

sache, est un etre vivant... Ie mot est Ie verbe, et Ie verbe est Dieu" (the word that one knows is a living being ... the word is the verb, and the verb is God).43 This is clearly expressed in "Let the Words" the poem that opens Wallach's 1985 collection Tsurot. O'~))~

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man's Leaves Of Grass and was bewitched by the limitlessness of its creative force (Sarna, Yona Wallach, 45), 43. Cited in c.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 24 .

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)7

exactly the same thing for they are the thing they make you will understand that they revive for you that experience and its meaning like nature because they are nature and not an invention and not a discovery for they are yes nature they will make the thing nature in you like giving sex is life to the word let the words act in you

Unlike the passive numbing patterns in part 0 of "Precisely," the voice that comes out of "Let the Words," while advocating passivity and submission, is nevertheless effervescent, promising in return the rewarding discovery of novel and gratifying experiences. The speaker of "Let the Words" does not seem to have the difficulties that impede his or her counterpart's impressiveness in part 0 of "Precisely," nor does he or she feel burdened by language's systematic network of signification. This speaker absolutely does not perceive language as alienating individuals from their own personal experiences; nor does he or she imply that language involves "an original murder of the thing,"!4 as the speaker of "Precisely" seems to argue (part 0). All through this poem we hear a glowing voice enthralled with freedom and creativity. And in Wallach's pervasive use of the Hebrew verb i1~V (act, do, form, create), creativity, for her, inheres in the linguistic sign itself. The literal meaning [\:)~!l] of the Book of Genesis determines that language precedes everything. Prior to man and the universe there was language and by its uttering things came into being from non-being: "... and God said, let there be light: and there was light" (Gen 1:3). The ensuing divine creation in Genesis bolsters the interconnection between divine speech and action: "And God said, let there be a firmament ... and God made the firmament ... " (vv. 6- 7) etc. In what follows, God's speech [c 1i1'n-( 1~Nl)] and the Hebrew verb i1~)l, interchangingly with N1J, stand for all foremost divine creations. The verb i1~)) relates to the creation of the "firmament" (v. 7), "the two great lights" (v. 16), and "the beasts" (v. 24). As many biblical exegetes argue, i1~).l means shaping particular forms or appearances out of the newly created [N1J]45 heaven and earth, implying in turn that heaven and earth are 44. Jacques Lacan, Ie Seminaire III (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 196. 45. N':1 signifies creation ex nihilo.

38

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

only raw materials from which the formations of further potential things are yet to appear ['Om '0)].46 Wallach, it seems, is fully convinced of the concealed potentialities that were introduced to the universe in the process of Creation. For example, in her poem "Breathing" [ilY.l)'lI)],47 an instructive voice, similar to the one we hear in "Let the Words," while imploring the same passivity and receptiveness, makes the following observation: "Let the breathing bring unfamiliar gases / different from the familiar ones .. '; let it bring the unfamiliar .. '; all kinds of gases that nobody knows .. '; the air is filled with unfamiliar materials... / the air is filled with mysterious materials ... " (emphasis added). In "Breathing," nevertheless, the speaker's objective is limited to awakening the addressee from the numbing effects of all repetitive human motions that result in the production of "anesthetic gas" [0"')) n], "poisoning gas" [)))li)) t)], or "suffocating gas" [t) jJ'm))]. In "Let the Words," the promise extends to a wonderfully creative experience that comes with submission to the essentially impregnating, life-giving nature of the words ("like giving sex is life to the word"). In both poems, as in much ofWallachs poetry, the experience reqUires (1) a poet's willingness to let go of everything one knows and (2) setting the culture free of all man-made imposing structures. 48 This is what Wallach not only says; it is what she does. While the imagery of a carefree gratifying sexual encounter and impregnation dominates the opening of "Let the Words" and the readers eyes scan through the lines, it may go unnoticed that Wallach's contextual usage of the Hebrew 0')')) (words) is utterly non-grammatical. In spite of its structural suffix 0'-, usually associated with masculine nouns, 0')')), as mentioned above, is grammatically a feminine noun and, therefore, the second line of the poem should have said: 1il) 1n (let them-female) and not Oil) (let them-male), as written. Beginning in line three, however, 46. See Sara K1ein-Braslavy, Maimonide's Interpretation of the Story of Creation [Heb.] (Jerusalem: Ha-l;Ievrah ie-l;Ieker ha-Mikra be- Yisraei, 1978),96-99. 47. Wallach, Mofa, 156-57. 48. It is interesting to note that while this claim coincides with Jacques Derrida's assertion that poetry involves the shattering of cultural dogmas, Wallach departs from his Postmodernist conviction that a poem is "always other, produced by an other which is never present in the poem." Jacques Oerrida, "Che cos'c la poesia," Poesia (Milan), 1.11, (1988): 5-10 (in French and Italian). For a Hebrew translation, see ";",'tI 'ilO," trans. Michal Guvrin, I:Jadarim 9 (1989): 49-50. For English and French, see A Derrida Reader, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Peggy Kamuf(NewYork: Columhia University Press, 1991): 221-37.

Wallach:\- Se((-Rejlexil'e Poems

39

Wallach's "words" not only return to their normative feminine grammatical gender, but their femininity is actually highlighted as she employs the archaic future structures iDODn and imun (they ([fem.] will enter), il))'O)Jn (will do), and il)))nn (revive), which formally distinguishes the feminine from the masculine, rather than the more modern, and more prevalent, future form m))l, 1NtJl, 1'0),\ and 1))n), used for both genders. Since Wallach, as we have seen above, believes in one's freedom to name feelings "as he pleases" ("Precisely," Part C), it is plausible to posit that at the time of uttering the words o)'mJ 1n (let the words), neither the Hebrew grammar nor the conventional definition of "word" were on Wallach's mind_ In fact, within the metaphoric infrastructure of this poem, words are equated at first with human seeds [O)lit-which is grammatically masculine in Hebrew] and as such considered a primary material from which new things are formed. The highlighting of the feminine gender of words thereafter underscores their inherently procreative power, for all living things come into being from the female, as written: "Look unto Abraham your father, and to Sarah that bore you [O)JJ1nn]" (Isa 51:2). This very same verb evidently appears in "Let the Words," precisely where the promise is the inception of a singular, distinctive experience [il)1n iln1N 1J 1JJ1n)] that is essentially one's own. The idea of returning words to their embryonic, amorphous state in order to have them recombined in pursuit of cosmic mysteries is a wellknown Kabbalistic practice_ The ability to combine [~""1::::1J] and make forms [""11::::1J], Seier Yetsira tells us, is a unique gift that allows one to emulate the act of creation [ilN)""1J].49 In Wallach's "Let the Words," the wondrous recombination and reformation of words appear as a self-acting response in the depths of the poets bosom ("they will do in you as they please), but the result is an equally phenomenal revival of the initial nature and quality of the thing as named ("will form in you that experience"). Echoing a known Kabbalistic conviction that "words are nature not an invention / and not a discovery" and that they "are the thing they make,"50 Wallach clearly agrees with Bialiks 1915 statement that "language contains no word that in the hour of its birth was not one of powerful and awesome self-revealment, a lofty victory of the spirit" 49. Gershom Scholem, Elements Of the Kabbalah and its S},mbolism [Heb.] Oerusakm: Mosad Bialik, 1976), 391-92. For an English translation, see On the Kabbalah and its S:Ymbolism, by Gershom Scholem, translated (from the original German) by Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, [1965] 1996). 50. See Moshe Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 19R9), 15-16.

40

"Loosen the Fetters o/Thy Tongue, Woman"

(emphasis added).5J She certainly agrees with Bialik that individual language precedes public language. Against the unifying nature of the common language, its abstract essence, triteness and triviality, she believes that prior to becoming public property devoid of essential meaning, all words come to life as a personal expression of a compound soul impressing its sensuous experiencing of the world ("they will make in your thing/ exactly the same thing/ for they are the thing they make").S2 As Ruth Kartun-Blum observes, "Let the Words" is a dazzling example of a meta-poetic poem that proclaims and demonstrates the creative force in language itselP3 While the preliminary, "heuristic reading" of the poem may insinuate the quintessential Postmodernist proposition that "language creates reality,"54 a second, "hermeneutic reading," which recognizes the wealth of allusive references in the poem's matrix, reveals a rather counterPostmodern, essentially RomantiC, slant in Wallach's self-reflexive poem. 55 Much as the poet submits to the words, letting them pass through her or perhaps, as Kartun-Blum suggests, through the poem itself-it is nevertheless crystal-clear that Wallach feels neither burdened nor trapped in an all-imposing "symbolic order" Gacques Lacans term) that, according to Postmodernist and Poststructuralist thought, predetermines one's perception, desire, imagination, thought, experience, and reality. 56 Against the Postmodernist/Poststructuralist argument 51. I:I.N. Bialik, "Revealment and Concealment." 52. In one of the most exalting paragraphs of his essay, Bialik contends that words come to the world as single syllables, which he refers to as "the seed of the future word [that] embraces a complete volume of primordial emotions, powerful in their novelty and vigorous in their savagery" and that at that moment "[man] was ... an intuitive creator of an expression, a very faithful expression, for himself, at any rate - pointing to a deep and complicated inner disturbance." 53. Kartun-Blum, Self-RefleXive Poetry, 19-20. 54. Rattok, Angel Of Fire, 112. 55. On the two levels or stages of reading a poetic text, see M. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 5-6. 56. Jacques Lacan, Ie Seminaire II (Paris: Seuil, 1978),43. See also E. Tavor Bannet, Structuralism. 17-23. Note that the terms "Postmodernism," which is directed taward art in general, and "Poststructuralism," which is directed toward human Ian· guage and mind, are initially two separate worlds of thought and motivated by different ideologies. They nevertheless share many common themes. Both involve the questioning of all "depth models, the decentering of the world and the self, the rejection of elitist aesthetics and experimental formalism, the disruption of all discursive boundaries, the obliteration of the frontiers between high and low culture and between art and commodity, and the resistance to meaning and interpretation"

Wallach.iI Self-Reflexive Poems

41

that we arc spoken for more than we speak or that we are like little robots echoing language and recycling petrified meanings,'i7 for Wallach common words categorically have an innate propensity to reveal that which has vanished into oblivion by the ever-consuming process of cognition, The belief in words' power to break though the metaphysical barrier where an unfettered self may discover nature and authenticity runs through all of Wallach's poetry. Wallach sometimes appears as a raging Id in pursuit of the "light of the souL/ the infinite.,,/ the secrets of creation,"'iH as she unceasingly attacks all cultural boundaries that, as she believes, guilefully conceal a dazzling spiritual reality locked inside of human consciousness, Arguing that "real life is hidden,"59 her poetic expression shatters prosaic language, which Bialik describes in "Revealment and Concealment" as the "hard sheet of ice" that stabilizes human's existence. Traveling through "the sealed walls",en route to some feeling / that will recover the possibility / that will penetrate the possible ... " her "teary and weary eye," as his, is looking for a "lucid passage" that will take her beyond the "daily practices" to a place where the vision is different from what "culture reveals." From that place she can write "about her language that is seen in her very own mirror."6o The influence of Bialiks essay on Wallach's perception of words and consequently on her poetic art cannot be underestimated, Revisiting the enduring philosophical question pertaining to the nature of language and words' meanings,6\ Wallach's conception in "Precisely" and "Let the Words" is an admixture ofKabbalistic lore and Renaissance N eoplatonism. It is the same supposition that Bialik argues forcefully in the first part of "Revealment and Concealment"-namely, that language is genuinely natural and words directly reveal the essences of things. What Bialik does best in prose, Wallach renders in poetry. After cracking (Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary 7heory rLexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1989), 74). As an art form, Wallach's poetry might be perceived as a "Postmodernist" manifesto, but as a verbal practice it invokes the possibility of a Poststructuralist "logic of dissent." 57. Lacan, Le Seminaire 11,353. 58. Wallach, Tsurot, 31. 59 Wallach, Shira, 156. 60. All quotes in this sentence are from Wallach's poem "Through the Sealed Walls," Tsurot, 182-90. 61. On the history of the study of language in modern times, see Hans Aarsleff, Prom Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

42

"Loosen the Fetters of 1hy Tongue, Woman"

the "sheet of ice" that obscures singularity and distinctiveness, as part A of "Precisely" shows, Wallach, like Bialik, realizes in part B that every individual word in-and-of-itself-and prior to turning into a conventionally spoken casual sign-is a living spirit within mankind. Observed in isolation and from within, as part C reveals, the meaning of the word is no longer as arbitrary and casual as it appears from without. Every single word has a natural material essence that corresponds precisely to a dormant yet living sensation as it occurs. Enveloped in the abstractions and generalizations of conventional language that Bialik articulates in his essay, Part D of "Precisely" contemplates the structural obstacles of the "external language" that impede words' creativity. Finally, in "Let the Words," Wallach implies that the "sheet of ice" melts away with desire-allowing, in Bialik's words, "an internal language, that of solitude and the soul" to come forth. Subscribing to Bialik's romantic portrayal of the poetic quest, Wallach is always in pursuit of the personal property of things. Always fleeing that which is fixed and inert in language, she uses words as unique "working tools" to penetrate her consciousness,62 in search of the "living I inside"63 and its cognition of things as perceived in the fleeting, never to be repeated moment. 64 Under her hands, in Bialik's words, "long established words are constantly being pulled off their setting... new combinations and associations are introduced ... the profane turns sacred and the sacred profane." But the sense of ontological nothingness that dominates the second part of Bialik's essay never enters Wallach's poetic scheme. She rejects his ultimate conclusion: "It is clear that language with all its associations does not introduce us at all into the inner area, the essence of things, but that, on the contrary, language itself stands as a barrier before them ... " Indeed, Wallach's relentless pursuit of the primordial sense of the word (Bialik's n)'lINi:l n'lllin) and her faith in words' power to reveal natural wonders that laws of nature conceal sets her apart from her eminent predecessor and the nihilistic attitudes that resonate through "Revealment and Concealment."65 Never subscribing to the "unbearable 62. "Words are working tools opening gates

to

consciousness," Wallach, Mala,

134. 63. Wallach, Tat Hakara, 300. 64. See Wallach's poem "To Live at the Speed of the Biography," in Tsurol, 104-6. The poem is translated and analyzed in Chapter Eight of this book. 65. Nathan Rotenstreich, for example, concludes that the key element of the Bialik's essay "Revealment and Concealment" is "skepticism [nui'!JoJ toward language."

Wallach,~

Se(fReflexive Poems

void" [tJ)i1l'1 J or "perception of ontological nothingness" that in his belief language conceals,66 Wallach argues passionately in "Let the Words" that, for her, words are always pregnant with meaning and their ability to secure indefinitely authentic experiences and self-knowledge is never in doubt. Wallach's attachment to Bialik's romantic perception of words as containers of vital essence [)l'1Inl:l tJ1J1D J and her detachment from his ~10dernist, nihilistic attitudes ("language conceals ... nothingness") has a far-reaching, and rather paradoxical, significance. While Hebrew poets since Bialik have been deliberately indifferent to their traditional roots, progressively viewing the past as a hurdle to the development of contemporary Hebrew poetics,6~ Wallach's "extreme innovativeness," characterized as a "violently huge tear in the sequence of Hebrew poetry,"68 shows a marked affinity for the "remarkably traditionalist" overtones that Bialik, the architect of Modern Hebrew poetry, is known for.69 At the same time, her perception of language is entirely optimistic, teleological, and redemptive, bringing to full bloom the essentially Romantic convictions of the marginal Hebrew poetic voices that cut through the outburst of modernist cynicism and continue to trust the spiritual core of the word and its creative prowess. 70

See Nathan Rotenstreich, "Revealment and Concealment," in Bialik: Critical Essays on His Works, an Anthology [He b.], Gershon Shaked, compo Qerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1974), 323-33. Cf. Robert Alter's assertion that '''Revealment and Concealment' gives us Bialik the Modernist." Alter, Modern Hebrew Literature, 127 -28. 66. Ibid. 67. On the Hebrew literary establishment's dialectical attitude toward its past, see Zohar Shavit, The Literary Life in Eretz Israel 1910-1933 [Heb. J (Tel-Aviv: Porter Institute, 1982),86-88. See also Nathan Zach's rejection of the poetic standards established by his predecessors in "On the Stylistic Climate of the Fifties and Sixties in Our Poetry" IHeb.), Haaretz July 29, 1966. 68. Rattok, Angel of Fire, II. 69. As Robert Alter notes, up to "Revealment and Concealment," for a writer who was immersed in the turbulence of twentieth-century experience, Bialik was remarkablya traditionalist in his poetry, fiction, and ideology of culture. 70. See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953),90-91.

3 From Direct Observation to Indirect Evocation: Wallach's Early Work Yona Wallach and the Poetics o/the 19505 The poetic revolution in Hebrew poetics that took place prior to Yona Wallachs generation of the 1960s was essentially a rejection of Symbolism and its clairvoyant overtones. Repudiating all reference to a subliminal, transcendental, wholesome world beyond temporal earthly existence, the leading poets of the 1950s disdained the symbolic expression of their predecessors, its esoteric vagueness, and its tendency to attain emotional suggestiveness at the expense of lucidity and sensory vividness. Avoiding boundless sentimentality in favor of bare emotions and breVity of expression, they preferred the clarity and precision of "images" to evocative "symbols" and required poetic expression to provide an immediate, sharp, and intuitive insight into what they believed to be the essence of life. l The "correct poem" ["''l'i'I ))))i'I], Nathan Zach insisted in poems and in various essays, is to be short, structured by a single image or metaphor, and present to the reader an object or scene from the external world for direct apprehension. It must not imply emotional impressions or extended abstract meaning. 2 Many of Yona Wallach's poems of the 1960s appear at first sight to

1. The three names usually associated with the poetic revolution of the 1950s are Nathan Zach, Yehuda Amichai, and David Avidan. 2. Nathan Zach, "Comments on the Margins ofIsraeli Imagism" [Heb.], Yokhani May 1, 1961; "On the Srylistic Climate of the Fifties and Sixties in Our Poetry" [Heb.], Haaretz July 29, 1966; "Imagism and Vorticism," in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (tondon: Penguin, 1976), 228-42. In a poem titled "The Correct Poem" (1)J)i1 "Vi1], Zach writes the following: "When the sentiment fades away, the correct poem speaks ... "

44

Wallach,\; Early Wbrk

follow Zach \ "correct pocm" formula. Most of them are short and mellifluous. Presenting a concretc, "realistic" situation and speaking in a dispassionate and reserved voice, their exotic imagery generates an instant glimpse into the existential plight of an innocent human being trapped in an unintelligihle world. Celebrating the ingenuity of Wallach's "perceptive poetics,"S most studies of her early poems focus on their external "hardened sensibility."4 And yet, the thin layer of simple images, as we are ahout to see, is but one aspect of Wallach's poetics and not the main one: underneath the surface of each poem lies a thick web of cross-references that elegantly invoke the presence of an alternate scenario veiled by structures of conventional language and thought. Lota combs her hair with a monkey wrench

l1p1nOY.l n\J," "~'l! nMY.l:l ';

... T

:.

T

.'::

-

••

:

-

:

O'~'!)P i)'l)'1)J,~

l1i'bnD '1P O'1~1:;J nDm" V1'nOY.l "¥i ni~i'b O'1~P l1?,?iV l1i.'-?'" nY,l i17 nN~"~ oipY.l:l m?'?,p i1\;>"'{i N7!)~ ~);, 17 'l!~¥i Nm l1'?~D n>?D"Y,ll11\?PY,l17 n>?7 t~ O'1)1:;J nDi'7 i1\;>i" ,,~~ .O"Y.l Pl iD'J,? N'n )~,?)11 Lota 5 1 With

a wrench Lota combs her hair is spiral springs 3 takes pills to com hat different 4 feelings of mystery 5 wears a web dress 6 and goes out what 2

3. E.g. Rcnan, "Building the Possibility of Feeling." 4. Zach. "Imagism and Vorticism."' 5. This translation is mine. Cf. Wild Light: Selected Poems o{Yona Wallach, trans. Linda Zisquit, 29.

46

"Loosen the Fetters o/Thy Tongue, Woman" Lota takes in instead of the truth is that you have a marvelous body 9 so why do you need a war smoking-pipe 10 hut Lota took pills 11 and now she understands only words. 7

8

"Lota" can be easily perceived as a quintessential "correct poem." Exemplifying the "doctrine of hardness" of the Imagists' poetics, it contains "non-poetic" materials such as "wrench," "spiral springs," "pills," and "smoking pipe." The language, moreover, is unostentatious, lacking poetic ornaments such as figures or tropes. Syntactical and structural rules are suspended and there is no exploration of psychic processes. It is narrated by a third person narrator who witnesses both Lota's actions and mens reactions to her eccentric behaVior, but it has absolutely no access to Lotas feelings and thoughts. The overall impression is that of a beleaguered woman in combat with mens sexual exploitation of women and with her own emotions. 6 And yet the poem is laden with textual peculiarities that cannot easily be explained in simple experiential terms. For example, why is Lota's hair "spiral springs" and why is she using a "wrench" to comb it? What are the various "feelings of mystery" she tries to control? Why is she wearing a sheer "web dress" if she attempts to repel men's sexual attraction to her? What does a "war pipe" signify? What is the "truth" she wants to hear and how does the narrator know what it is? Prominent investigators of the language of poetry such as Yury Lotman, Michael Riffaterre, and Tzvetan Todorov argue that when a text is incongruent with experience, language, and the world as we know it, the process of interpretation begins. Yet interpretation, they explain, is but an aspect of Symbolism. A text or discourse becomes symbolic at the point when, through the effort of interpretation, the association of something present with something absent evokes its meaning.7 For the Hehrew reader, the interpretation of Wallach's "Lota" begins with the character's name. It is not the only foreign name in Wallach's early poetry. But whereas other names she uses-such as Christina, Cornelia, Nizeta, and Cecilia-connote within Hebrew culture the mythical beauties one finds in children's classical tales, Lota is predominantly the 6. Cf. Rattok, Angel of Fire, 80-81. 7. Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, Riffaterre, Semiotics Of Poetry; Todorov,

Symbolism and Interpretation.

Wallach s Early lfbrk

47

name of an elderlY Eastern European immigrant and, therefore, incompatible with the erotically appealing woman featured in the poem. Still looking for the source and meaning of her name, we can easily associate the name Lata with the biblical Lot, the sale survivor of Sodom-the town of sexual exploiters and sinners (Gen 19). This name may also be associated with a lotus flower-an ancient symbol of the "mystic center" and of emanation and realization. 1i Likewise, the name Lota can be readily linked to the Hebft.."W root 1,)1' [lot], which signifies a veil keeping its wearer safe from danger (1 Kgs 19: 13), or \J), [lutl where the biblical phrase reads: "And the priest said [to David], the sword of Goliath the Pelishti, whom you didst slay in the Valley of Ela, behold it is here wrapped [n\J),] in a cloth behind the Ephod" (1 Sam 21: 10). These associations suggest that "Lota" represents a heavily disguised persona, an ill-treated woman of superior moral essence who seizes customarily male tools (such as a "wrench" and "war" tools) and uses them cunningly against heartless antagonists whom she perceives as hedonistic exploiters and sinners. While the portrayal of Lota in the first two lines of the poem could certainly be that of an actual deranged woman, she may also be read as a quintessentially modern version of the mythological Medusa, the once beautiful maiden who was turned into a harridan with twisting snakes for hair. ~)1'? U'~D

Z't,

Yonatan 18 1 2

3 4

5

6 7

I'm running on the bridge and the kids are after me Yonatan Yonatan they call out a little blood just a little blood to wash down the honey I agree to a pierce of a tack

18. The translation is mine. Cf. Warren Bargad and Stanley F. Chyet, Israeli Poetry: A Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington, University ofIndiana Press), 238; Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 25.

Wallach:' Early

~rork

')1

but the kids want and they are kids 10 and I'm Yonatan II they cut off my head with a hranch of 12 gladiola and gather my head I~ with two hranches of gladiola and wrap 14 my head with a rustling paper I'; Yonatan 16 Yonatan they say 17 really forgive us H! we didn't imagine you were like that. H

9

"Yonatan," one ofWallachs first puhlished poems, like "Lota," can easily qualify as an exemplary "Imagistic" poem. It is narrated in the language of its place and time. In a detached voice, a first person male narrator presents to the readers a chilling event. It is a story of a socially rejected child who is being viciously pursued hy a hunch of wicked kids who get anything they desire in their sweet life (honey is their main course). His reluctant decision to submit to their demand for "a little blood," or his agreeing to a tiny "pierce of a tack," is self-destructive and results in his demise. As naughty kids oftentimes do after the damage is done, the ones featured in this poem express regret and ask for forgiveness: "really forgive us ... we did not imagine you were like that." In other words: We did not know. How could we know hetter? Aren't we kids, after all? Told from the victim's point of view, Yonatan's plight is firmly encoded in the poem's structural design.19 The perfectly grammatical syntax of the first ten lines transmits a calm and controlled state of mind despite the disturhing event they portray. Running desperately for his life, Yonatan-an ignohle creature for whom freedom consists of submission and depravity-agrees to his pursuers' demands, helieving his cooperation will finally appease them. What he does not understand is that desire can last only as long as it remains unsatisfied. For him, therefore, the sequence of events following the "agreement" is mindboggling and-as the subsequent four lines of the poem totally spill out of form- the reader can easily apprehend the state of panic of a bewildered victim gasping for air: "they cut off my head with a branch of / gladiola and gather my head / with two branches of gladiola and wrap / my head with a rustling paper." Surprisingly, however, once Yonatans 19. See Nathan Zach, Time and Rhythm in Bergson and in Modern Poetry [Heb. J (Tel Aviv; Aleph. 1966).

52

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

severed head is "packaged," the syntax resumes its grammatical order (last four lines of the poem): "Yonatan / Yonatan they say / really forgive us / we didn 't imagine you were like that." Does Yonatan accept his fate? Does it appease him to have his head wrapped like a sandwich in "rustling paper"20 and hear his tormentors' hypocritical apology?21 Does the poem simply intend to provide a "sharp and intuitive insight" into the life of a social outcast? Or into a life marked by irony and disdain? As these questions continue to disturb the reader, others surface: Why is this fictional hero named Yonatan? Why is a renowned biblical hero such as Yonatan Oonathan, the son of King Saul) transformed into a feeble-minded antihero? Is this irony inherent merely in the poems structure or in realHfe as well? Yonatans hardship clearly emanates from his name ("they are kids / and I am Yonatan"). Though named after a classical leader who embarked on daring journeys and met challenges head-on (e.g. 1 Sam 14), in the imaginary social milieu that Wallach creates, this very name signifies a prototypical "nerd." This inversion nevertheless derives from contemporary Israeli society itself. Every Hebrew-speaking child in Israel knows the nursery song featuring a mischievous child named Yonatan who got himself in trouble for tearing his pants while looking for little chicks in a tree.22 Evidently to be the subject of a sing-song in and of itself is derogatory and degrading, particularly when the subject is a mindless kid. Consequently, naming a child Yonatan in modern Israel results in dire consequences for that child, irrespective of his personality or essence, or the implied man of virtue for which he is named. It is obvious that Wallach intends to link her "Yonatan" to the biblical narrative of 1 Samuel, chapter 14. In this story,]onathan, the son of King Saul, is portrayed as a brilliant military logistician and an audacious fighter (vv. 8-13). But he is also arrogant and disrespectful of authority (v. 29) as well as of the religious laws (v. 32-33). As the Bible tells it, King Saul charged the people with an oath not to eat food on the day they defeated their enemies (v. 24). But Jonathan did not know about the oath. Thus when he entered the woods after his dazzling victory over the pelishUm, "there was honey on the ground ... streams of honey; but 20. "Rustling paper" ('tI,'tI,p ,')) is a recurring metaphor in Yehuda Amichai's poetry of the 50s (e.g. Shirim 1948-1962, 24) and in Israel, during those years, was associated with a "sandwich paper" and not a fancy gift-wrap. 21 . In children's vernacular the Hebrew expression ill:> jl'1"1n 'n-< (don't be like that) usually implies "join and share with us." 22 . ... ))

,'tI, "

")N' '1N .'tI!l'T1 0'T11'!lN ~Y1"1 'Y O!l'" N11"1 1)1"1 'N 'P1)) ~, 1"P1"1

1m1'

Wallach s Early Wbrk

no man put his hand to his mouth: for the people feared the oatIl. But Jonathan ... he put out the end of the rod that was in his hand and dipped it in a honeycomh, and put his hand to his mouth; and his eyes were hrightened" (vv. 25-27). When told of his father's oath,Jonathan's reaction was "My father has truubled the land, sec ... how my eyes have brightened, because I tasted a little huney" (v. 29). Suon after the narrative proceeds, the victorious people of Israel took sheep and oxen and calves and "did eat them with the blood" (v. 32), "a sin against the Lord" (v. 33) that Jonathan did not attempt to stop. Though willing to pay with his life for the sins he had committed, Jonathan was nevertheless pardoned (v. 45). He continued to live a splendid life until the final battle, where he met a violent death, together with his father and brothers, whose mutilated, beheaded bodies the enemy displayed on the walls of Bet-Shan (1 Sam 31:6-13). Ironically, of course, Wallach's Yonatan, for no reason at all, is executed by the children, who are hut savage sinners deserving the punishment they inflict upon him. The ironic overtones of Yonatan's fate grow out uf the manner in which the biblical story and the poem intersect, interact, and disengage. A sense of deep-rooted irony arises also from the portrayal of children as mean-spirited, blood-thirsty creatures. In every tradition a child seems to stand for unadulterated purity, freshness, spontaneity, simplicity, and naturalness. In fact, one gets a sense of puerile innocence even in this poem when Yonatan refers to them as "[just] kids" and agrees to their bloody games. Arguably, their portrayal as "just kids" only magnifies the horrors of their deeds. And yet, the otherwise gruesome act of decapitation is somewhat softened in the poem by the use of decorative flowers to behead their victim and gather his severed head, and a "rustling paper" to wrap it. This can be explained by Wallachs underlying affinity for French Symbolist poetics and her early striving to extract la beaute du mal-that is, the beauty from blood, 25 death,24 evil, and immorality.25 Moreover, attending to the symbolic evocation of "gladiola branches," one can easily envision them not as a weapon of destruction, that is, a ~,;word, 26 but for what they manifestly are in this poem: majes-

23. See, for example Wallach'S later poem "A Cycle," in Jl.foja, 22. 24. See, for example, Wallach's poem "Dead in the Land," in Shira, 101. 25. See, for example, Wallach's poem "Black Hand," in Shira, 81. 26. In Latin 'gladiola' 'gladiolus' means a small sword. The Hebrew word for gladiola, )!l'0, comes from '1'0, a sword which appears to be a common tool of decapitation in Talmudic times (Sanhedrin 7:3).

54

"Loosen the Fetters a/Thy Tongue, WCmzan"

tic ally tall flowers that carry a precious "angelic head" to its eternal rest.r The possibility that the poem features the death of a heavenly creature, or a saint, is enhanced once Yonatan's plight is linked allusively to the image ofthe embattled Christian Saint,John the Baptist. John was a preeminent symbol of morality and righteousness in his time. According to the New Testament, his speaking against the immoral marriage of King Herod Antipas to Herodias, his brother's wife, led to his execution. His severed head was presented as a reward to princess Salome for her dancing before the King (Mk 6: 17 - 29). As Yair Mazor observes, this allusive association arises from the semblance in the names Yonatan [)Jm'] and Yohanan [pm']-the Christian saint's Hebrew name [))m' ?':l\:»:li1].28 For Mazor'S interpretive objectives, however, John's story is just another canonical narrative that links our Yl;l .n~'?n'p

Cornelia38 1

2

3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

In the middle of the night the devil appeared and told Cornelia that this is the time and Cornelia who lacks initiative and must Cornelia and the devil went in the middle of the night to pick nettles the devil got tired and retired Cornelia has a nettle rash and picked it was thinkable really that Cornelia is a red devil in the morning men did to her because they thought that Cornelia is a red she-devil and Cornelia did not know she always thought they do to her because she is Cornelia.

38. This translation is mine. Cf. Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 29.

N)tl ):;>

Wallach's Early WiJrk

57

Told in intelligible, matter-of-fact language, "Cornelia" provides at face value an immediate, biting, heartfelt picture of an innocent girl sexually exploited by a bunch of ruthless men. A feminist reading of this poem would discover at once both a typical stylistic pattern and a deep sense of irony. Leaving with the devil on cue in the middle of the night, Cornelia at first has no clue as to where they are going or why.39 And yet, exploited as she is, Cornelia nevertheless finds "picking nettles" quite zestful and pursues this act on her own, not realizing that the display of eagerness deems her at once a "lady of the night."40 Akin to Yonatan, Cornelia's quandary, we should note, is embedded in her peculiar name: "She always thought that they do to her/ because she is Cornelia." In Israeli society "Cornelia" is a name one would certainly associate with a mythological beauty.11 In Hebrew, however, it contains the verb )1iJ (radiate). Consequently, Cornelias glowing face (due to the "nettle rash") evidently alludes to Moses' shining face when he descended Mount Sinai with the two tablets of Testimony in his hands (Ex 34:29). Like Moses, who did not know that his face shone when God spoke to him (Ex 34:30), Cornelia is unaware of the glow that follows from her unusual experience. Or perhaps-of the linguistic ambiguity of her shine. For in modern Hebrew the expression il')!) 1)N )1iJ (her face glowed), contrary to its biblical connotation of inviolability, signals a licentious woman! A deep sense of irony also arises from the narrative structure of the poem. Cornelia's story eVidently opens just like a common fairy tale. Lines such as "in the middle of the night" and "this is the time" allude further to a very particular fairy tale, namely, Cinderella. However, the familiar plot is immediately disrupted. Instead of a marvelous fairy godmother, who is going to save the virtuous maiden from being used and abused, Cornelia encounters evil and immorality itself. Rather than be39. In Annette Kolodny's theory, Corneli3.·s story represents a typically "reflexive" p3.ttern of perception in fem3.le n3.rr3.tive. "Reflexive perception," she argues, occurs when a character discovers herself or finds some P3.rt of herself in activities she had not planned or in situations she cannot fully comprehend." Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism,'" in Critical Inquiry, 2, I (1975): 79. Quoted in Tori! Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Iheory (London: Routledge, 1985), 71. 40. Rattok, Angel of Fire, 79-80. 41. In classical mythology. there is a beautiful maiden named Coronis. She was loved by Apollo but preferred a mere mortal-and paid for it with her life (Hamilton, Mythology, 279-80).

58

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

coming a beloved princess who lives happily ever after, Cornelia turns into a she-devil and returns to a life of submission and exploitation the very next morning. 12 The disruptions in Cornelia's story do not pertain to the narrative structures alone. Suffering from abrupt shifts, ellipses, breaks, and apparent lack of logical construction, the syntactical scheme appears to frame the heroine's diminished mental capacity. If the reader, for example, can easily comprehend what the devil's intentions are, it is not exactly clear to Cornelia, "who lacks initiative and must" [do what,] inasmuch as the grammatically incomplete sentence reflects an incomplete idea as it is experienced in her impaired world-view. 43 Similarly, as the next incomplete sentence implies ("Cornelia has a nettle rash and picked"), this doltish girl continues to pick prickly nettles even though she is wholly afire and in fact can stop this senseless activity since the devil has already retired. Cornelia's mental deprivation and limited intellectual abilities are further embedded in the cohesive ordering of the poem as well. The name "Cornelia" is mentioned ten times in this fifteen-line poem. In eight out of the ten, Cornelia is the grammatical subject, or agent, in the sentence and is mentioned directly by name, Cornelia, never "she." When pronouns are used rather than reiteration of her name, Cornelia is the grammatical object in the sentence, no longer the agent. At this time reference is made to the state of mind of the men who "did to her," indicating in turn that for them Cornelia is but a nameless object of desire. On the other hand, the continual mentioning of the name "Cornelia" as a grammatical subject corresponds to a typically childlike narrative discourse patterns (Daddy took me to the park and Daddy 42. On the subversion of classical stories in Hebrew poetry by women, see Lily Rattok, "Curving in Water" [Heb] in Sadan: Studies in Hebrew Literature: Selected works on U:omens Hebrew Poetry, ed. Ziva Shamir, (rei-Aviv University, 1996), 16';-202; Chaya Shacham, Women and Masks: From Lots Wife to Cinderella [Heb.] (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001). 43. In one of his most powerful essays, M.A K. Halliday shows how a writer can make us respond not to what the syntax reflects in terms of the subject matter, but rather to the syntax in and of itself. When this is achieved, a sentence means not what it says, but rather what it is. Halliday, "Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An InqUilT into the Language of William Golding's 'The Inheritors,'" Essays in Modern St),listics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London: Methuen, 1981),325-60. Yael Renan, in her essay "Building Possibilities of Feelings: Aspects in Yona Wallach's Early Poetry," is the first one to argue that the incomplete sentences in "Cornelia" reflect the protagonist's limited world-view.

S9

pushl'd me on thl' swing, etc.) reflecting once again Cornelia's undeveloped mind and limited world-view. And yet, "Cornelia" does not simply depict an innocent victim of males' lust, as some scholars seem to believe. 44 Even Yair Mazor, who unveils in "Yonatan" layers of literary allusions, and in the background of "Cornelia" identifies variOllS "European fairy tales," fails to realize this poem's allusive link to a well-known classical myth, the story of the Greek Goddess Core and the profound effect of that myth on signification processes in "Cornelia."4'i The beautiful daughter of Zeus and Demeter, Core was in the meadow picking flowers when Hades (or Pluto), the king ofthe Underworld, otherwise the devil, appeared, kidnapped the frightened screaming childlike maiden, and carried her off to hell to be his queen (therefore, a female devil herself). Although Zeus and Demeter eventually were able to obtain her release, because she had eaten the red pomegranate seeds Hades offered her in the underworld, Core was obligated to return to hell and spend the winter of each year with Hades in the underworld. 46 The italicized words above, all appearing in "Cornelia," make it clear that the story of the mythological Core is certainly imbedded in the deep structures of Wallachs poem. Like Core, Cornelia is an innocent maiden with a very limited childlike view. She is controlled by the devil, cannot withstand his seductive powers, and by submitting to his infernal passion, at once transforms her own sexual ardor and determines her fate. Strikingly miSSing from Wallach's version, however, is the fascination and love that initially provoked the classical devils action. Here, his sole motivation is a lascivious need to fulfill an urge. The subversion of the female image in Wallach's version of the classical myth is even more striking. Cornelia, unlike Core, is passive and submissive as she obediently follows the heartless devil on command. And yet, during the implied sexual act she is not only a fervid participant: her sexual powers are evidently far superior to the devil's, who "got tired and retired" while she continues to "perform" incessantly through the morning. One may argue, as Yair Mazor does, that Cornelia is Wallach's version 44. Rattok, "To He a Prism and Not Shatter;" Mazor, "You Won't Find Snow White There." 45. Note that the name Core means literally "maiden." She is better known by her Roman name Persephone. 46. Bu/finch's Mythology (New York: Dell, 1%9),51-56.

60

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Wbmmz"

of Dalia Ravikovitch's senseless "Clockwork Doll" [jmmn inn J, or as Lily Rattok does, that Cornelia is a prototypical victim of moral double standards. She is a victim when she is obliged to ignore her libido and she is a victim once again if she allows herself to submit to her desire. For whether one is a classically submissive female or freely pursues her sensuality-in both cases she is still an insignificant object in men's hands. And yet, we must also realize that as Wallach elevates Cornelia's sexual strengths, almost inadvertently, but with poetic sophistication, she undermines the all-pervasive belief in male arrogance and chauvinism that is based on male physical and sexual superiority. The man, as featured in the poem, is not only pathetically worn out, but his glorious days are over, as the word 'i)"1!), "retire," implies. Moreover, possibly alluding to the only appearance of the word "nettle" in the Bible: "Instead of the thorn shall the cypress come up and instead of the nettle shall the myrtle tree come up" (Isa 55: 13)-it seems clear who, in Wallach's judgment, has the upper handY' The subversion of men's universal association with physical might and sexual superiority is only one example of the unsettling impact of Wallach's work. Changing the stories we accept as divine truths, she will attack every preconception we live by and challenge the authorities that secured them. An "omniscient author,"48 Wallach expresses in "Cornelia" a complex ironic judgment relating to pervasive images of female and male at the same time: of the female, by way of manipulating the surface (syntactical and narrative) structures of the poem and of the male by way of an intertextuallinkage. In overlooking the ancient mythology that underlies "Cornelia," previous interpretations center solely on the heroines innocence and submission but disregard the poem's indirect, yet essential, confrontation with male virility. In so doing, they miss an important dimension of Wallach's poetic genius: the revision she makes in the stock of stories that make up our social contract is arguably the pinnacle of her poetic revolution.

47. It is reasonable to infer further that the poem alludes to the famous om' ''tIY.l (Yotam's Parable) in the Book of Judges, particularly to Jud 9: 15 "and the bramble said to the trees if in truth you anoint me king over you, come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, fire will issue from the bramble, and destroy the cedars of Lebanon." 48. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1961).

Wallach,~

61

Earll' Work

When 1 look in the mirror

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2

Opening "A Few Matters," the second set of poems in Devarim, "When I Look in the Mirror" marks Wallach's departure from the exotic figures and dramatic effects of her first published poems and at first glance seems to approximate the keenness of Imagistic poetics more than ever before, Utterly devoid of poetic figures or discernible allUSive references and rendered in a dispassionate and reserved voice, the picture it presents is familiar and actual. It focuses on a passing moment in time, at once impressing upon the reader the mental anguish of an individual

62

"Loosen the Fetters o/Thy Tongue, Woman"

who is trapped in a cold and passionless, habitual and tiresome world she is unable to comprehend or perhaps accept as reality itself. The presence ofa mirror in the first line of the poem initially supports the presumption that the poet intends to render a scene from the external world for direct apprehension, inasmuch as a "mirror" generally reflects precisely the formal image of a real object in real time. But the word "hallucination" conspicuously positioned in the very beginning of the second line immediately challenges this supposition, suggesting instead that the vision that comes henceforth is mentally induced and therefore an irrational fallacy. Furthermore, the speaker's undetermined assertion that what she "seems to see" in the mirror is not pain itself but rather "the hallUCination of pain" indicates that the pain, which assumes utmost significance upon one's first encounter with the poem, is merely imaginary. With tender love and ample warmth dominating the next four lines, one begins to wonder why an individual who ~knows nothing but warmth" may feel pain altogether. Confronted with these inconsistencies, we must realize that "mirror" is an instrument of reflection and that its Hebrew eqUivalent m!:lpmm, pertinent to I)P'O (transparenlj.l ill:>l':>'I! ilr.J (what Lota is able to understand 21), ;')11:> Ur.J::ty':> O''I!1Y 1)nlN (we pat ourselves, or we do ourselves a favor, 9); ill N':> ill (this isn't it, 23), nY)J1'1!r.J mllil ON (if I went nuts, 24), etc. 5. See Renan, "Building Possibilities of Feelings." 6. For further assessment of Hebrew poetry in the 1960s, see Nathan Zach, "The Stylistic Climate of the Fifties and Sixties in Our Poetry" [Heb.]; Chaim Nagid "Stylistic Landscapes" [He b.] , Moznaim 2 - 3/62 1988; Yair Mazor, "On Hebrew Poetry of the Sixties" [Heb.], !ton 77 197 (1996): 34 -46; lton 77 201 1996: 83-89.

74

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80 90 10 II 12

13 14

15

a feathers pillow opens to the wind you jump into a feathers pillow at the most paved with stars collapsing from here on this purple mister wants to plant on it.

Articulating the experience of one's liberation from an earthly existence and ascent to an exalted place among the stars, this poem, like many of Wallach's early poems, is embedded in a life-like situation? Addressing a distinguished male, who has a brilliant (sun) or semi-brilliant (moon) sensibility [l1ml1v)I]-the speaker in this poem is wholly astonished that her addressee, a "supreme being," as the word )nN (mister) insinuates in Hebrew, perhaps even a "master of the universe" [0)))/ )nN], is unable to see nothing (three times zero) beyond his earthly, temporal existence.8 7. This is Yael Renan 's chief argument in "Building Possibilities of Feelings." 8. The three O's, as Yael Renan observes, also render visually the image of a firmly closed way of being while at the same time articulate orally the Hebrew exclamation ho, an expression of extreme joy as well as extreme sorrow and pain.

·Wallach s Confessi()nal Poetry

7';

Positioned in the middle of the poem and separating the earthly from the heavenly, the three Os end the cycle of a pitiful mundane world-view of the addressee and lead to a richly imaginative one that the speaker favors. To activate the imagination, asserts the speaker of the poem, one needs to concentrate on a natural phenomenon and become part of it. Here, envisioning the explosion of a pierced feather pillow as it sends its previously contained feathers flying freely up in the wind triggers everyman to "lose his head" [m)~m')I1)N"], feel released and weightless like the loose feathers, and with them reach to the skies. From this heavenly viewpoint, the speaker, standing firm on (as on a firm floor) or among the bright stars and just prior to plunging like a meteor back to earth, takes in and becomes overwhelmed with "this purple," the most enigmatic expression in the poem. Purple is a common color of velvet. If we turn to the very next poem in Devarim and realize that for Wallach "every moment in the sky is velvet,"9 we see that this color connotes an extremely delightful place of dwelling, a celestial garden any "mister" would wish to cultivate. In "If a Sun or a Moon," one of her first published poems, Wallach expresses, like HurVitz, a desire to escape the discontentment of conventional life and enter a transcendental reality of heavenly bliss. Although a well-structured, evocative poem that skillfully concretizes a profound sensation of a fully conscious, gifted artist, \0 the work never captured many hearts, as "Yonatan," for example, did-perhaps because there is nothing novel or extravagant about it. Wallach, eVidently, manages to dazzle her readers only when she interjects violence and brutality into human existence (as in "Yonatan"), or when she dauntlessly communicates personal experiences that were previously considered private and taboo.

I didn't get to finish my son Avshalom

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I must remember one more time my son Avshalom whose hairs were caught in my womb and I didn't get to finish my son Avshalom I'm building the possibilities of my feeling pity gushes within me and the possible hunger the desire for ancestry and Avshalom who was not permitted in a different metamorphosis Avshalom will be my lover and I'll experience the memory of when my lover Avshalom is a physical feeling or how my stomach is empty of Avshalom my son is an arrangement of falling

11. The translation is mine. Cf. Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 4.

r:mry

Willlllclt's Confessional Poetry 17 18

19 20 21

22

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24 25 26

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stars and a sword hitting with a magnet on her heart a precise feeling: what will the wi nd battle and where will it rest where will the wind carry you my son.

Maternity has been considered a woman's fulfillment of her physiological destiny, her natural "calling" and responsibility. Barren women throughout the ages prayed to God to open their wombs and take away their "reproach" (Gen 30:23), to give them a son, "a small child," to brighten their desolate lives. 12 And God sometimes "remembered" pious women like Rachel (Gen 30:22) and Hannah (1 Sam 1:19) and hearkened to them and gave them the precious sons they yearned for. Against this heart-rending background, it seems that Wallach, who underwent two abortions early in her life, 13 is determined to confront this shameful and degrading female ordeal that women generally try to forget. Rendered in a voice of pathological melancholy, the speaker invokes the memory of the son who was "not allowed" and attempts to come to grips with complex feelings of yearning, loss, and gUilt toward the child she did not get to "finish" [im)" ,., N!t' N.,].14 One should notice the poet's passive voice. Beginning with the .,))~) construct i~t'i'., (remember) in the first line instead of the resoundingly active .,))~ verb i'~t", the reader senses an attempt to retrieve a memory she hardly wants to revive. Similarly, Avshaloms hairs were passively "caught" [1O!>TD] in this woman's womb and he was "not allowed" [i1'Oi'i1] to enter the world. Removing herself from the violent act of killing her own flesh and blood, it is indeed hard to discern who the speaker feels more pity for, the doomed baby or herself. As a woman, she is overpowered by a natural desire to procreate ("the desire for ancestry") and therefore mourns his loss. But in her naming this unborn child 12. E.g. the poet Ral:Jd in her poem "il'v)l" (barren woman). 13. According to Igal Sarna, "Avshalom" was written in 1963 after her second abortion (Yona Wallach, 61, 83). 14. Cf. Renan, "Building Possibilities of Feelings."

7H

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, WrJlnan"

Avshalom and evoking an image of the ill-fated heautiful son of King David who conspired to kill his father and take his place, 1S Wallach, albeit reluctantly, lets us know that she was compelled to relinquish motherhood in order to preserve her independence and pursue the life of glory she desired. Recreating the drama of a short-lived pregnanL]', Wallach evidently realized that for a woman it is natural to lose herself unconditionally, body and soul, in the love and caring for the child she hears, much as she loses her self when she is in love, or makes love to a man. The fusion she finds in copulating with a "lover" is what she feels when she carries a baby in her growing stomach.lt. But the sentimental depiction of motherhood as stardom [0':1:'" ",'t?], Wallach suggests, is only an illusion. With the sword-a well-known symhol of virile bravery and spiritual aggression 17 pounding on her heart-she realizes that the baby in her womb was merely a "physical" growth [n')!m iw.nnn] and could not give meaning to her indiVidualized existence. Her building of the "possibilities of feeling" is therefore finally "precise:" invoking I:I.N. Bialiks famous line ":1, ,'1:1' ,rm'{, Ion, )ni!l 0':> n"n N'O) 0" (the wind carried them all / they all flew away / and I was left alone, all alone), Wallach is a woman who chooses spiritual growth and personal "glory" while letting the wind carry her child into his inevitable (non)destiny. 18 Wallachs subversion of women's psychological realities regarding creativity and procreativity is nevertheless only one side of "Avshalom."19 Positioning herself in the center and exposing her vulnerability and shame, Wallach inaugurates with this remarkably confessional poem her incisive study of the experiences of the conscious self and the independent life of the mind. 20 Ready to deal with both the darker side and the integrative spiritual faculties of being, she is determined to battle

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15. See 2 Sam 18: 18-19. 16. See Helene Deutsch, Psychology of Women (New York: Grune & Strattom, 1944). 17. See "sword," Dictionary of Symbols. 18. The Bialik poem is "By Myself"(Levadi).According to (gal Sarna, Wallach was a~ked after her second abortion in 1963 what would be her three wishes at present. Her answer was: "glory, glory, glory" (Yona Wallach, 83). 19. Cf. Rattok,Angel of Fire, 19-20. 20. Karl Malkoff, Escape from the Self. A Study in Contemporary American Poetry and Poetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 99. A "confessional poem," Malkoff asserts, is a poem that "dares to speak of things that hitherto have been considered taboo."

Wall{{ch 's Cor~fessiollal Poetry

79

the pressures of the environment, struggle with the psychic forces within her, and unleash the mental energy that will recover her essential nature and personal destiny.21 The poetic ingenuity of Wallach's confessional mode can he detected throughout Del 'a rim in scenes such as Yonatans nightmare, Lota's presumed madness, or Cornelias sexual exploitation. But the best of her confessional poems, all written before 1976 and included in Shira, are those in which she unfetters arcane images from her subliminal mind in an attempt to study her inner world and identify her authentic self. My ship ought to be described as one-of-a-kind

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Ho sea, heaven, I've been wrapped in fogs blended with the steam of my eyes, your white seagull will come down clumping to the poles and fluttering becoming living sails of my ship. Fish will carefully fly from all sides like smashed splinters of glass for good luck at a wedding a slant rain will drop as if purposely to wash my sweet genuine face becoming safe and warm streams. Ay; soul, spirit. Round and round in circles I'll spin please chill my hot head, jellyfish will couple together making sheer garlands will beset me around like a curtain to my eyes floating like a sign to turn back. Naughty, restively, I'll calmly wander in the melancholy decorated with pearls like love drops sea weeds will cover my shoulders like a cloak even my kinsmen will not be able to seize me my ship ought to be described as one-of-a-kind.

One of "Island Poems (l)"-a set of six dazzling poems featuring mostly the beauty of nature in a richly figurative language-"Ho Sea, Heaven" transports the reader to an essentially surrealist universe akin to Rimbaud's famous "Le Bateau ivre."22 On a ship plowing through the endless seas, the speaker appears to be swept away and wholly immersed in boundless exhilaration. Noting her impassioned voice, one senses in her sensual words the desire of a woman who wants to be loved. The main imagery in "Ho Sea, Heaven" is hence that of an ecstatic bride on her wedding day. 23 A garland on her head, a gown on her shoulders, and 22. Since Rimbauds poem was translated into Hebrew in the early 1960s (by the poet Sh. Shalom ), it is plausible that Wallach was indeed influenced by its surrealist poetics. 23. Cf. Oorit Zilberman's contemplation that the main picture in this poem is that of a man or a woman confronting the beauty of nature while sailing in the deep seas (Essays, 14). According to Lily Rattok, however, the main imagery in "Ho Sea, Heaven" is that of Jesus Christ (Angel of Fire, 28).

Wallach s Confessional Poetry

81

pearls around her neck-she is overwhelmed with passion and delight. Repeating the emotional sighs of wonder, but also of desire and gratification, Izo and ay, she hids rain showers to come and purify her. She envisions seagulls as white angels descending from above to escort her and "flying fish" that appear like splinters of a glass smashed under the Jewish f,luppah (wedding canopy) for good luck all around her. Most materials in the poem are light, airy, and translucent. Wholly submerged in ecstasy, the speaker, in a state of emotional drunkenness and rendering her adventures as a reverie, no longer knows if she is in heaven or on earth, alive or dead. Reading the poem at face value, one might argue, as Rattok does, that Wallach-who later in her life proclaimed herself a "mystic -articulates in this poem a "mystical wedding ritual that is all beauty and enchantment," which engenders her "messianic designation.n24 And yet, the oceanic experience in the heart of this poem-the feeling of sinking into and being absorbed by a boundless ocean-is not necessarily a mystical state. Psychiatrists since Sigmund Freud have collected similar accounts of transitional states characterized by falling away of all the borders of consciousness and by a pleasurable sense of all-oneness. Most people have such experiences, which occur mainly during puberty or during other transitions from one period in life to another. Abraham Maslow, studying the inner life of healthy humans, calls them "peak-experiences" and regards them as the goal of development, ending in human maturation. 25 While mystical overtones abound in Wallach's poetry and indeed contribute to the myth of Self that she fully develops in many of her later works, "Ho Sea, Heaven," one of her earlier poems, is more about recovering one's own "face," 26 ones one-of-a-kind or one-time only (lr.1))!l"1n] self, and one's own course of being in the world.27 Its abundance of well-known symbols and archetypes are all associated with "individuation"-a psychological process aimed at psychic wholeness. "Ho Sea, Heaven" is therefore a confessional document of a "a child of pictures and visions"28 who finds under the threshold of consciousness her distinct individuality and the meaning of her life. n

24. Rattok,Angel of Fire, 27. 25. Abrham Maslow, Religion, Values and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976). 26. On the meaning and uses of "face" in Wallach's poetry see Lilach Lachman "Like the Image of the Face." 27. Note that in Hebrew the word il'llN ( ship), sometimes 'llN, is very close to 'IN (I). 28. Wallach, "The Islands of Life," Tat Hakara, 283.

82

"Loosen the Fetters o/Thy Tongue, Woman"

Sea and heaven are two natural phenomena that are shapeless and endless. Blended together, they imply a primordial state of precreation wholeness before God "separated between the waters which were under the firm aments and the waters which were above the firmament" (Gen 1:6). Thus the speaker's being "swallowed" by sea and heaven signifies at once that she is far from culture and civilization and has returned to a state of utter formlessness. A "return to the sea" is a "return to the mother"-that is to say, to a state of non-being.29 The speaker's appearing in the beginning of the poem shrouded in "fogs" indeed supports the notion of dissolution in "Ho Sea, Heaven." But the image of dissolution is in itself a symbol of an initiatory death and of a new beginning, the passing from a state of imperfection into a superior state of being.3° The image of the ship plowing through the seas represents precisely this transition. A ship is a symbol of crossing. It always involves a deSire to transcend existence-to travel through space and through transition and evolution toward salvation-in other words, toward wholeness. 31 The seagulls and flying fish that navigate Wallach's "ship," are recurrent yet elusive symbols that together emit the sense of spiritual quest that winged beings frequently represent. 32 Rain, too, is a primary and obvious symbol of a fertilizing agent and is often perceived as an emblem of the spiritual influences of heaven descending upon the earth. 33 For Wallach, "slant rain," or "shower rain," is obviously a source of spiritual irrigation and rejuvenation, which results in spiritual maturation, as the mention of a "hot head" suggests. 34 Rain being primarily a symbol of purification and renewal, the journey rendered in "Ho Sea, Heaven" reaches its climax when the speaker is able to sense her God-given primordial face [')!l on''VNiJ] and individual one-of-a-kind [nm)j£l,n] being-in- the-world. 35 The garland, as a circle, represents the ultimate state of oneness. In dreams, the circle is the symbol of the self and it indicates the end of 29. See "water" and "heaven: Dictionary of Symbols. 30. See "death," Dictionary of Symbols. The sense of initiatory expiration appears a few times in Del'arim (e.g. "Yonatan") and is spelled out in Kamah Inyanim where the poet writes: "I can't see myself other than melting away" (Shira, 38). 31. See "ship," Dictionary of Symbols. 32. See "bird," Dictionary of Symbols. 33. See "rain" Dictionary of Symbols. 34. See "heat," Dictionary of Symbols. 35. Cf.]oseph L. Henderson, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," Man and His Symbols, ed.]ung, 146.

Wll11ach s Confessional Poetl)'

83

the process of individuation, of striving toward psychic wholeness and self-realization. 56 In "Ho Sea, Beaven" the garland that would be placed on the speaker's head will indeed be a "sign" that her "rite of passage" is completed and she is to return to earth. Safe and secure with the knowledge she had gaine')~!:l n)~OJ O'JPDl;lY.:> unry il'r'?D J?1 n)n)l' un;, Un)N' T:

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5 Masking and Unmasking: Female Images in Wallach's Early Poetry Historical Background: "Feminism Under Siege"! The title of Dan Miron's rounding Mothers, Stepsisters, first published as an essay subtitled "On the Emergence of Women's Poetry in Hehrew," and then as a book subtitled "On Two Beginnings in Modern Poetry in Erets Yisraei,"2 is a telling tale: women's poetry in Israel, "as in America and as elsewhere," in Alicia Ostriker's words, "from its inception has been ghettoized, confined as a special case within a pale of limitations,"3 Victims of a "politics of excluSion," as Michael Gluzman argues, major women poets have been marginalized and excluded from the Hehrew canon even as the traditional barriers on women's authorship were finally lifted and they were welcomed to participate in the cultural life in Erets Yisrael during the pioneering era of the 1920s and 1930s. 4 1. The title is borrowed from Yael Feldman's essay "Female Images in Israeli Women's Fiction" in Proojte:x1s 10 (1990). 2. Dan Miron, "Founding Mothers, Step Sisters: On the Emergence of Women's Poetry in Hebrew," I Heb.1, in Alpaim (I) 1989:29-58 and Alpaim (2) 1990: 121-77; Rmnding Mothers, Step Sisters: Two Hegbming in Modern Israeli Poetry [Heh.], (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad 1991). 3. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 10. 4. Michael Gluzman, "The Exclusion of Women from Hebrew Literary History," Proojtexts 11 (1991): 259-78. On the marginalization of women writers in the Hebrew literary canon. see also Amalia Kahana-Carmon's following articles: "To Be a Woman Writer," IHeb.1 Yedio/ Al,lronot, April 1", 1984,20-21: 'To be Wasted on the Peripheral," [Heh.] rediot Al,lronot, Sept. 15,.1985,22-23; "Brenner's Wife Rides Again," [Heh.] in Moznaim 59/4 (1985): 10-14; "She Writes Rather Pleasantly, but About the Insignificant: fIleb.] Yediot A/:Irono/, Feb. 4, 1988, 20, 25; "The Song of the Flying Bats," [Reb. J Moznaim 3-4 (1989): 3-7. For an English translation of "The Song of the Hats" (by Naomi Sokoloff). see Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and

105

106

"Loosen the Fetters oflhy Tongue, Woman"

The "politics of exclusion" resonates loud and clear in the poetry of the humble "romantic icon" Ral:Iel (Bluwstein), who Miron, for instance, credits with playing "a decisive role in molding the norms for women's poetry, and influencing public and literary expectations of poetry." It reverberates also in the poetry of the remarkably independent and highly regarded Yokheved Bat-Miriam, as well as in the poetry of the sexually empowered, but wholly marginalized (by her contemporaries) first Israeli feminist, Esther Raah 5 This sense of exclusion is registered mainly as critical protest concerning women's peripheral position in culture and sOcietyi as well as their incapability to define their own being,-;- These poets, nevertheless, make an urgent attempt not only to confront the dominant culture, but also to offer an alternative vision. Leading the pack, Esther Raab carves the "awesomely majestic" image of a nature woman who "sipped the scent of grape buds and blossoming orchards with her mother'S milk. .. [and] was lullabied by untamed eucalyptus trees heavy with wasps and bees." Though respecting her "holy grandmothers in Jerusalem" and their traditional roles, she is nonetheless a Promethean woman who cunningly defies male authority and, while sitting with Deborah (the biblical judge and a war hero) under the palm tree, engages in "manly" matters such as security and war.8 Less direct, hut equally forceful in its subtlety, is Ral:Iel's revision of the female image in a poem titled "Ral:Id." In it the poet seems at first to embrace the romantic perception of the "mother of all mothers," but then proceeds to identify with the biblical matriarch's premarital, Yiddish Literature, Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich, eds. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992),235-45. ';. For short biographies (in English) of these poets and some of their poems (in Hebrew and in English translation), see The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems, edited with introduction by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar S. Hess (New York: the Feminist Press, 1999). 6. E.g. Ral~el: "I have only known how tell of myself. / My world is like the ant's .. '; ... / My way, like hers to the top of the tree, / is a way of pain and struggle, mocked / by a contemptuous giant hand / and maliciously blocked. / / All my paths twist, are wet with tears / because of my fears of a giant hand ... " The Defiant Muse, H8-89. 7. Note, in particular, Yokheved Bat-Miriam's poem from Hidden Treasures that begins with the words "Just as you see me, that's how I am: / no eye-shadow, rouge; neither makeup or charm, / but barbaric, perverse, and extremely rude - / that's how I want to stand before you" and ends with "And here I am before you, just as I am, / barbaric, perverse, fuming bitterly. / And a bare, harsh lament envelops me / for myself who won't be the I of me." The Defiant Muse, 104-6. H. Esther Raab, "Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem," The Defiant Muse, 92-95.

Female Images in VVallach." Ear(y Poetry

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therefore primordial, state of being "in the desert."') The imagery of "desert"-a profoundly evocative symbol for a realm outside the sphere of culture that is susceptible to transcendentalism-is also prominent in Yokheved Bat-Miriam's revisionist design of minor biblical women such as Miriam and Hagar, two (albeit different) social outcasts who were left to die "outside the camp" in the desert.]() As the editors of The Defiant Muse assert, biblical and postbiblical texts were always the bedrock of Hebrew poetry. As modern women poets in Hebrew confront their cultural heritage, they seem to develop "a complex and fruitful relationship with traditional Hebrew texts," akin to the developments Alicia Ostriker describes as "revisionist mythmaking" in her influential study of womens poetry in America. I I To transform the "sanctuaries of language where the meanings for 'male' and 'female' are stored and rewrite them from a female point of view," as Ostiker proposes, Hebrew women poets nevertheless hardly confined themselves to decoding and re-coding Hebrew traditional texts. Beginning with Leah Goldberg-a prolific literary personality in Israel's formative years and a woman well-educated in world literature images from the Western canon began to penetrate womens writings as well. Goldberg rarely expressed strictly "feminist" views in her lyrical verse, but her vivid images of exotic, passionate, and uninhibited women, as for example, in her reproduction of the legendary French noblewoman Teresa De Meun, 12 certainly must have inspired the essentially feminist overtones in the poetry of Goldberg's successors (and Yona Wallach's precursors), Dalia Ravikovitch and Dalia Hertz. "Confessional" in nature, like much of Goldberg's essentially romantic verse, Ravikovich and Hertzs poetry of female discontent of the 1950s is linked subtly with legendary far-off worlds that Ravikovitch sadly describes as hopelessly crippling for women 13 and that Hertz confronts with unprecedented courage. Imparting experiences of female 9. "Ral).el," The Defiant Muse, 84-85. On Ral).el's subversion of the cultural image of the biblical Rai)el in this and other poems, see Chaya Shacham, Women and Masks, 131-33. On Rai)el's pondering of her pre-cultural nature, see also her poem "In One of My Metamorphoses" ["1)') 1muj. This poem does not appear in 1he Defiant Muse and as far as I know has not been translated into English. 10. The Defiant }Huse, 106-9. On the image of Hagar in modern Hebrew poetry see Shacham, Women and Masks, 104-28. 11. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 11. 12. Ihe Defiant Muse, 114-17. 13. E.g. "That night, I was a clockwork daHl and I whirled around, this way and

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"Loosen the Fetters of Thy longue, Woman"

exploitation in a chillingly "factual" manner, Hertz intertwines mythological or pseudo-mythological themes with expressions of vulgarity and scenes of crude sexual lust, puncturing sanctimonious views of the reality she is determined to undermine. I I As Lily Rattok recognizes, Wallachs first volume, Devarim, published in 1966, certainly appears to inherit Dalia Hertzs poetic legacy.l; Like Hertz, who named her book Margot, Wallach is attracted to exotiC, far-off names such as Lota, Cornelia, Cecilia, Casius, and Sebastian in her search for new heroes and heroines and an outlandish approach to poetry and life. Like Hertz's, many of Wallach's poems feature a bizarre world rendered in a language utterly liberated from grammatical norms and moral etiquettes. One can even find in Wallach's early poems real evidence of the unequivocal traces of Hertz's (and Ravikovitch's) expressions and themes. \(, Wallach never tried to conceal Hertz'S impact on her. The title of her first collection Devarim (Things) is precisely the title of Hertz's last poem in Margot. And yet, further similarities between these two highly gifted poets are not substantive. There is neither beauty nor romantic lure in Hertz'S Margot. Though Hertz is witty and linguistically virtuoso, her poems-hardly distinguishable from prose-are rugged and ohscene. In contrast, Wallach's poems throughout Devarim are lyrical and her unique evocative mingling of image and music often shows saliently Symbolist qualities, regardless of the horrors they depict. 17 In addition, Wallach's use of myths, legends, and fairy tales in her early poems is nowhere akin to Ravikovitchs longing for a lost childhood in "wonderland," as Rattok contends.!!! Instead, in Wallach's hands the literary that, / and I fell on my face and shattered to bits / and they tried to fix me with all their skill... " The Defiant Muse, 142-4314. Hertz, whose 1961 Margot is an invaluable collection by a cunning female voice, is not represented in The Defiant Muse, perhaps because of her short-lived poetic career or the difficulty of translating her ingenious play with Hebrew words into English. 1S. Hertz remains active in Israel's cultural life but her next poetic volume appeared only in the early 1990s. 16. On the rclation of Wallach's poetry to Dalia Ravikovitch and Dalia Hertz, see Yair Mazor, "The Mighty One, The Mad One, and the One Who Dared" [Heb.], lton 77 (220) 1998: 11-41; Rattok, Angel of Fire, 43-49. 17. In this sense one can sense the impact of Leah Goldberg's lyricism on Wallach's early poems. Some of them, as some of Goldberg's "love poems," became popular songs. A compact disc titled "A Good Vintage" [J1\J "'~Jl (1991) features the singers Ilan Virtzberg and Shimon Gelbetz singing eleven of Wallach's poems. 18. Rattok, Angel of Fire, 66- 7 4.

Female Images in Wallach's Ear~y Poetry

109

canon is manipulated as a cultural and political tool that at once tells of women's abrasive reality and yet subverts it. Furthermore, her discovery of women's power in her earlier work subsequently allows Wallach to "take the masks down" (Mofa, p. 130) and make language-the ultimate source of female oppression, as prominent feminist theories contendwrite precisely the story of her individual self not as a female or a male, but as an authentic human being living an independently authentic life. 19

The Projection of Female Victimization in Wallach's Early Work "Yonatan, "Lota," and "Cornelia" exemplify on one hand how Wallach, confronting the poetic climate of her time, managed to write poems that design a picture of a concrete reality from without and a world of subliminal existence from within.20 Registering predominantly conditions of marginality and oppression, Yonatan, for example, is a prototypical social outcast; Cornelia is a senseless, sexually exploited girl; and Lota is a woman with an exceptional brain that men haphazardly overlook as they lustfully crave her "beautiful body." And yet, the external design of each of these characters and their experiences of powerlessness, low status, marginality, and "otherness" is only half of their story, and not the main one: each of them, voiceless as they are, embodies a human strength that Wallach cunningly interjects into the surface of the poems indirectly via a complex, underlying network of intertextual correspondences with multiple classical and biblical sources. In her response to female images in eminent patriarchal texts, Wallach does not simply bemoan sexism, demand equality, or even extol femininity. Convinced that gender is determinedly not destiny and that it is not the biological sex of a person but "the subject position she or he takes up that determines their revolutionary potential," as Julia Kristeva asserts, Wallach's poetic scheme essentially projects and rejects the presumption that the dichotomy between masculine and feminine 19. See The Women and Language Debate: A Source Book, eds. Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Christanne Miller (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1994). The book contains many influen tial essays from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, and literary theory that have sparked the debate about language and gender since the turn of the century. 20. See Chapter Three.

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

110

is metaphysical. 21 This proposition places Wallach's feminist undertaking on the top of a historical and political process that goes beyond both liberal and radical feminism to challenge the notion of identity based on gender characteristics, and to reconstruct one based on human qualities both men and women equally share. 22

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21. For a comprehensive summary of Kristeva's feminist theory in English, see Moi. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 149-73. 22. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 12-13. Moi defines "liberal feminism" as a quest for equality and "radical feminism" as an exaltation of the female.

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and I tOld him yeast dough only yeast dough an idea of desolate nights in a soft sun when Frederick imitated the walk of ~izeta passing out from desire not even a glass of cold water but a glove alone.

Within the intriguing poems of Wallach's Devarim, "Nizeta" stands out as an enigmatic text with an exotic, yet wholly fabricated name for its protagonist. Attending solely to a single intelligible statement in the poem, "Nizeta is Red Cap / Nizeta is something / that you're burning to devour," one can hastily conclude that akin to other characters in this volume (Cornelia, Teresa, Christina, Lota, Antonia, Cecilia), Nizeta represents women's innocence, or that she is merely another prototypical target of mens ruthless lechery.23 In this literary scheme, nevertheless, one would expect Frederick, who has a non-Jewish, yet common male name, to be an irresistibly virile man. Yet the character we meet in the poem is the opposite. Frederick is a man overcome by passion and desire who loses his rational senses upon encountering one (presumably attractive) woman. Because Frederick is a well-known, ancient Roman name of prominent kings and emperors, warriors and conquerors who were also famous for their virility, their promiscuous lifestyles, and the many women they entranced, Frederick's diminishing nobility in Wallach's poem is even more perplexing. 24 The study of Nizetas peculiar name and its conceivable allusion to "Nysaean nymphs"2s results in a similar quandary. The companions of ArtemiS, the virginal Goddess of hunting in Greek mythology, nymphS in general are divine beauties not especially known for their chastity. Gods and mortals sought their favors and their pursuers were the satyrs, half-men half-goats known for their virility and their participation in Dionysiac orgies. 26 Likewise, the mere association of a literary character 23. Rattok, Angel of Fire, 78; Zilberman, Essays, 59. 24. E.g. Frederick I (1121-1190), emperor of the Holy Roman empire called Fred· erick Barbarous (the barbaric); Frederick II, "the Great" (1712-1786), emperor of Prussia. 25. Nysaean nymphs are mentioned in Greek mythology as the caretakers of the abandoned Baccus in the valley of Nysa (Hamilton, Mythology, 331). 26. Veronica Ions, The Worlds Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1974), 105.

112

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

with a "nymph" may bring to mind the image of a true "nymphomaniac"-a woman of "excessive and uncontrollable sexual fervor"27 and an eager participant in a frenzied bacchanalia. But any association of Wallach's Nizeta with a promiscuous female, much as Fredericks with a virile male, does not seem to coincide with the poem's descriptive details, which show her as a royally attired lady in a coat or a cap and gloves. Still, the mere identification of mythological, or quasi-mythological, figures in the foreground of the poem and their adverse portrayal may suggest that Wallach's "Nizeta" is an artful design by a poet who is determined, in Alicia Ostriker's words, "to disrupt and alter our sense of literary norms."28 Speaking in multiple voices, "Nizeta" evidently consists of three parts. The first six lines and the last four-the two sections beginning with the words "when Frederick"-seem to report an omniscient perspective of Frederick's insensible conduct. The five lines in the middle of the poem feature the voice of a first person narrator whose gender the Hebrew grammar does not reveal, yet who appears to be an impregnated woman in a fanciful state of mind, addressing a male interlocutor. Dressed in a "coat," the Hebrew ")JY.l, the common apparel of kings' virginal daughters, as the Bible specifies (2 Sam 13: 18) and pointing to a swelling "yeast dough" (P!fJ, 2 Sam 13:9), the story of Nizeta is linked at once to one of the most harrowing stories in the Bible, narrated in chapter 13 of the Second Book of SamueL It tells of Amnon's (a son of King David's) "love" of his beautiful half-sister Tamar; the debilitating distress the fierce desire for her brought upon him; his ineptness to "contrive anything in regard to her;" the detailed scheme his friend concocted to have her come over to bake him bread; the despicable rape; his sending her away in disgust right after; and the ordeal ending in Tamar's detainment-mute and desolate [ilY.lm'lJ]-in her brother's Avshalom's house. Containing many details of Tamar's ordeal as the highlighted words clearly indicate, "Nizeta" is a response to the quintessential story of women's victimization. Seeking, as Modernist and Postmodernist feminists do, to restore women's dignity and power, Wallach seems to know all too well that she must repudiate and nullify all stereotypical imagery 27. Websters Dictionary. 28. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 211. Note that Ostriker uses the term "mythology" broadly to include historic and even quasi-historic figures, folktales, legends, and Scripture (213).

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that perpetuates female oppression and offer at once an alternative perspective to the patriarchal stories that preserve their pitiful images 29 Wallach's inversion of the alluded biblical narrative begins with the structural scheme of the poem. In "Nizeta,"' the infirmity of the royal pursuer is not only the beginning of the story but its end too. Aroused by her looks ("When Frederick saw Nizeta") and losing his head in distress in the first part of the poem results in Frederick's (not Nizeta's!) physically battered condition in the second and final scene of this encounter. In a state of "faint," as he appears at the end, one can easily envision, much as Cornelia's worn out demonic pursuer, a man who is unable to keep up with a woman's sexual prowess)O Unlike "Cornelia," however, there is nothing in Nizeta's story to suggest a passive, feebleminded girl who follows her pursuer obediently and shamelessly emulates his deeds, or that their contact was altogether sexual and disgraceful. On the contrary, Frederick positively did not "knock her out" for, as stated determinedly in the poem, "the wind" blew her coat and what she proceeds to tell him about her "blowing up" in the middle part of the poem is a figment of her creative imagination. On the other hand, looking knocked-out, as he does in the end, seems to suggest that while impetuously considering her body an easy prey in the first part of the poem, Frederick failed to realize something about her hand in a gloveindeed initially unknown to all-which will ultimately end in his dishonor, not hers. Much like the coat in the center of the poem, the glove is an obvious shield that comes to protect Nizeta from the "cold element" she had just encountered, and/or from Fredericks direct touch, perhaps even indicating that she indeed anticipates a cold-blooded assault. Meeting Frederick again in the last part of the poem, still overcome with passion and in a state of "faint," reinforces the sense of a physical fight that we, the readers, have already began to postulate. Nizeta's extending her hand to him, or her "throwing the glove at him," as the expression goes, in the first part of the poem was obviously deceptive. While he interpreted it as having her hand, for her it was an invitation for a "boxing dual." The sense of a punching glove and a "strong hand" [i1j?tn ,,) fiercely 29. The suhversion of female images in patriarchal texts is the cornerstone of "feminist poetics," as prominent feminist scholars in America and Europe have argued forcefully since the 1960s. On women's deconstruction and reconstruction of female images in literature, see Women Writing and Writing About Women, Mary Jacobus, ed. (London: Croom Helm, 1979). 30. See Chaptn Three.

114

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tbngue, Woman"

pounding a weakening opponent is featured guilefully in the last part of the poem, which alludes to a Talmudic phrase and the art of il~y') (flatbread) making: "[the dough] expands-punch it with cold" (Pesa/:zim 3 4).3 1 Yeast dough, which was at the heart of the scheme that triggered Tamar's rape and subsequent desolation in the biblical narrative, is in Wallach's revisionist story surely beating Frederick down and, ultimately, turning female exploitation on its face, Furthermore, her featuring "yeast dough" as a central poetic figure and a cohesive link in "Nizeta" suggests that a human's size, or stature, the Hebrew n~)), is Wallach's primary concern. As Nizeta blows up, we should note, Frederick drastically deflates. And as we see him following her around and mimicking her gait,32 Nizeta finally not only has the upper hand, but is the one who is leading the way-a closure that sharply challenges not only every old myth but also contemporary "phallocentric ideology."33 Refusing to enact the role patriarchy has prescribed to women and weary of their prevailing literary images, Wallach's design of "Nizeta" presents the male perception of female's victimization ("Nizeta is Red Cap") but immediately proceeds to offer an alternate story that challenges the logic of a masculine/feminine dichotomy and the entire range of attached attitudes, such as positive/negative, activity/passivity, culture/nature, head/emotions, intelligible/sensihle, logos/pathos, that Helene Cixous highlights in her assault on "logocentric" male thought. 34 If Frederick indeed appears as pathetic as he does, it is because Wallach attributes to him all the "feminine" qualities in such traditional binary oppositions. And yet, astutely aware of the risk of creating an inverted form of sexism, Wallach's design of Nizeta as a woman of great physical and mental potency (traits considered universally "male" qualities) is subtle and heavily disguised. Wallach is not out to extol femininity or to destroy masculinity, but to reject, in Simone de Beauvoir's words, "biol31. Emphasis mine. 32. It is possible that Wallach's activates here another Hebrew idiom ,.,nl'( iljJnno il")., ''0''''0, literally, following the roots of her feet. 33. Phallocentrism, as Toril Moi explains, "denotes a system that privileges the phallus as the symbol or source of power" suggesting, in turn, a biological explanation for male superiority and leadership (Moi, Sexual/f'extual Politics, 179, n. 5). 34. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," The Women and Language Debate. The English translation by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen appeared first in Signs 1, no. 4 (1976). Logocentrism, a term that Jacques Derrida coined, refers to the mainstream of Western thinking that privileges the Logos, the Word as a metaphysical presence (Moil, Textual/Sexual Politics, 179).

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ogism as essentialism." Fleeing fixed gender identity. she seems to understaml that the goal of the female struggle is to revoke the "death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity" so that a new approach to human identity, based solely on interchangeable individual characteristics, can evolve. 35 Embodying feminist poetics of 1960s, Wallachs position on female objectives also mirrors the major theoretical reflections that only began to sweep the academic world at that time. Of course, the struggle to deconstruct the male/female dichotomy in literature, as Tori! Moi realizes, began with Virginia Woolf's invention of the concept of androgyny some sixty years earlier. Woolf's androgynous vision is highlighted in Orlando, the only book of hers that was available in Hebrew translation in the early 1960s and one that undoubtedly affected Wallachs feminist stance.3 6 Teresa carefully welds around her mouth

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"Loosen the Fetters of Ihy longue, Woman"

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Teresa There's no way out as there's no way in 3 carefully weld around the mouth 4 behind every curtain 5 on your (mas,) bed sits peacefully 6 who 7 the letter: H you (fern.) know nii'PD '» O!)\?' " N~i' 1'{, ~!)~l;1i1? 1'{'1 i1Y;l9'!~ ni'i;1? l'N. iDN. 'i1'l'Y,l iY.l::> )1'~ii1" O?)!D,? iN ,nf:l "?,?, i1"1i11D 0'i;;9 ni1,?ipi'tiD '? nl'{ i1"W1 N'i1 t1'!) nN. J\?'i1 i1l;1tW' .0"Y;lm 'NiJ~ 1'{'J~ ': ':

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her soul, which she then professed self-assuredly. As an author, St. Teresa was non-dogmatic. She wrote spontaneously without erasure or revisions from experience while constantly looking for "nL"W words." But she also initiated the silent prayer as a way to penetrate what she termed the "castle of the soul," where one's ultimate existence, she believed, is firmly grounded. These biographical notes and comments on St. Teresa are adopted from Borchert, Mysticism, 284-89.

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121

Cecilia46 In the pink areas passed me Cecilia 3 dripping blue bells 4 explain this to me 5 she asked the man that crossed her way 6 he explained to her that it isn't a wave 7 she didn 't understand that 8 her brain worked hard 9 but she wasn't able to feel it IOshe understood that he lives it lland that she doesn't get it l2I'm constantly a fog said Cecilia 13and on the mountains it was already pink on the top 14I'm constantly a fog in a pan I sand when I try hard 161 feel residual marks 170n this note Cecilia didn't want 18to burden me with exact facts 191 knew that the birds destroyed her 20and that next to the sea shetl have crumbled 2Il want to evaporate said Cecilia 221 no longer climb the walls at nights 23how to be a prism and not burst 240r disappear and reappear like something else 2son the mountains the dark red color controlled the blue 26she finished all the chocolates nand carefully wiped off her mouth 28S0 that the ants won't come. I

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The last poem in Devarim, Wallachs portrayal of Cecilia seems to follow at first glance the omnipresent combination of an exotic beauty and a child-like, vulnerable woman. Narrated alternately by an observer/commentator and Cecila herself, the story line of the poem appears to be as follows: Cecilia passed by the narrator "in the pink areas" "dripping blue bells." Evidently troubled by this puzzling matter, she asks a man "that crossed her way" to explain it to her, but she is unable to understand his reply: "It isn't a wave." She then turns to the narrator, who witnessed the 46. This translation is mine. Cf. Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 32 .

122

"Loosen the Fetters of1hy Tongue, Wbman"

encounter, telling him or her hriet1y ahout her intangible state of being "a fog in a pan." The narrator reports the conversation with some personal observations that underscore Cecilia's vulnerahility.47 The dominant voice of the narrator throughout the poem creates a strong impression of Cecilia's heing a flimsy, intellectually inferior woman who is unahle to survive in the male organized, factual world. Her essentially emotive mode of cognition, this narrator seems to determine, is the cause of much of the pain and suffering Cecilia is doomed to endure. 18 But the narrator's comments, we should note, are in effect merely a set of societal cliches (" ... her brain worked hard / but she couldn't feel it" [for she is a woman ... ]). They are based solely on a hasty observation (" ... passed me Cecilia"), incomplete information ("Cecilia didn't want to burden me with exact facts"), and unprivileged knowledge concerning Cecilia's mental ineptitude and physical frailty ("I knew that the birds destroyed her / and that next to the sea she would have crumbled"), since this narrator/observer has absolutely no access to Cecilia's mind, thoughts and/or feelings. The following analysis is designed to show how Wallach juxtaposes Ceclia's extraordinary nature with the ordinary interpretation of the narrator in order to present a common definition of female identity yet at the same time to interpose a new one based on an individual's unique character and personal characteristics. We will see how Cecilia, who is named after a celebrated and well-known Christian martyr, is designed as a modern day saint, a hallowed woman sent to refurbish our withered planet, using the kind of keen sensibility that our hahitualized worldview has systematically paralyzed. 49 A sense of aridity is evoked in "Cecilia" in the very beginning of the poem. The "pink areas" in the first line, suggesting at first sight a setting of twilight and doom,50 in Wallach's poetic scheme are evidently associated with the Israeli landscape at summer's end, as rendered earlier in a 47. Cf. Renan's study of "Cccilia" in "Building the Possibilities of Feelings." 48. This is Rcnan's conclusion. Cf. Rattok's conclusion in her essay "To Be a Prism and not Shatter" and in Ange/ of Fire, 52-53. 49. According to Christian mythology, Cecilia converted to Christianity at thc time when it was still illcgal to do so and was sentenced to death for her belief. It took two attempts before the killing of Cecilia was successful. She was first locked in a bath in her own home to be suffocated by steam. When she emerged from the bath unharmed, she was then beheaded (See The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol III, 1908: Online Edition 1999). 50. See Renan, "Building Possibilities of feelings."

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poem by Ral)el: "In the morning of [the month of] Elul the world is pink and light blue."51 Cecilia's appearance on these ashen lands "dripping blue bells" is a supernatural phenomenon and a numinous one. It signifies the arrival of a divine message, as the bells imply directly (in Christianity). The Hebrew word rnp'm (areas, lands) subtly hints of a divine signal, as well once we locate one of its most well-known biblical appearances, in Amos 4:7: 'tJ::1)n j,,"}) i)\)r.ln N" i'tJN np"m i\)r.l)n nnN np"n (one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it did not rain withered). That Cecilia represents the arrival of a divine being is reinforced in her asserting "I'm constantly a fog in a pan." In the Bible, God appears on earth in a "fog," the Hebrew "~i}) (Ex 20:21), his permanent dwelling (1 Kgs 8: 12; 1 Ch 6: 1). The word n))::1n (pan), commonly associated with a confining structure (e.g. baking pan), similarly suggests in the Bible an ultimate original being (e.g. Dt 4:18) and in the Talmud explicitly signifies a mortal cast in a divine mold (Ketubot 8). And yet, against this sense of Cecilia as a pure and holy misSionary, another Talmudic citation, nN)i) j)))N n~"1r.l n'tJN (Nida 10), asserts that a "dripping woman," as Cecilia appears, is in the literal sense of the word nN)i (a woman who sees/woman seer) devoid of vision or prophesy. 52 Cecilias asking for an explanation therefore entails a need to understand this vexing contradiction. Cecilias relation to the man that "crossed her way," 1i1::1 n" P)'tJr.l, to whom she turns for an "explanation," is equally ambiguous. Relating to the world of mathematical SCiences, the Hebrew word P''tJr.l (perpendicular) seems to underscore the all-male, scientific world Cecila inhabits, as other studies of the poem suggest. 53 But in its only biblical context in Ezekial (3:13 "the noise of the wings ... as they touch [mp''tJr.l] each other"), the word P''tJr.l signifies conversely a close affinity and intimate kinship (as opposed to a single point of meeting).54 Linking this biblical text with "Cecilia," we can easily argue that Cecilia considers the man on her (own) path her kinsman and a lofty man much like herself and

51. RalJel, Shira, 1951, 13. This citation appears in Even-Shoshan's New Dictionary under 1m (pink). 52. Note that in the Talmudic context in Nida, the verb ill'll' relates to menstrual discharge. 53. Renan and Rattok. 54. Ez 3: 13 ilmnN '1'1 miN mp''t'" m'nil '~)' , literally: each of the animals' wings touches her sister!

124

"Loosen the Fetter:., of lhy longue, Whman"

therefore finds his earthly logical/scientific answer, "it is not a wave," perplexing, The fact is that the mans assertion, "it isn't a wave," a formula used extensively in logical contemplation, is incomprehensible no matter how "brainy" the (male or female) addressee is. Therefore, Cecilias "trying hard" to understands his reply has nothing to do with an inherent mental deficiency, as the narrator construes. Moreover, once we listen attentively to some of Cec1ia's many assertions throughout the text, it is evident that her "scientific" background is in fact qUite solid. She obviously knows precisely what a "prism" is and how it functions, and even the narrator, we should note, readily admits that she is quite capable of reporting "exact facts." On the other hand, the narrator's understanding that Cecilia avoids the "facts" because of some trepidation from without ("the birds destroyed her")55 or an inherent frailty ("she would crumble next to the sea")56 is once again his or her sheer speculation. The narrator's interpretation of Cecilias wish to "evaporate" is merely another misreading of Cecilia's peculiar assertion. Viewing Cecilia as a woman who has been brutally tormented for the unconventional route she has chosen, the narrator infers that in desperation Cecilia wants to pass from view or out of existence, But a critical study of the physical aspect of evaporating hints conversely that what Cecilia wants is to turn into mist and to continue to water the waste lands she feels destined to fertilize. As a "mist from the earth" rising to sprinkle "the whole face of the ground" (Gen 2:6), Cecilia, as a matter of fact, announces that she is no longer frustrated with her unique nature or with her subsequent isolation and victimization ("I no longer climb the walls at nights"). Formed, like Saint Cecilia, as a source of light and enlightenment, she knows that she is a crystalline body ("prism") that cannot contain the light that goes through her. She also knows that her natural property and numinous destiny entails much hardship, Above all else, she knows ''is. Within the context of "Cecilia," or Devarim in general, there is not enough information to help us understand who the birds are. But they surely resemble the feroCious birds of prey that destroyed the "innocent dove" in Dalia Ravikovitch's poem "The Dove" [im'il]. This intertextuallink bolsters our suggestion that Cecilia is victimized for being a "rebellious woman" who is resented by men and women alike for leaving "her nest" and trespassing into an all male territory. Dalia Ravikovitch, KaT Hashirim Ad Koh (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1995),43. 56. Anybody who knows Tel-Aviv can easily envision the crumbling old buildings along the city's waterfront. Evidently, the early builders of Tel-Aviv did not have the scientific knowledge that would have prevented the corrosion of these structures.

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that she is what she is and cannot "disappear or reappear like something else" and therefore, regardless of the intensifying threat (darkening colors in the background), she continues to indulge ()Pen~v with that which satisfies her desire. Wondering ahout the mysteries of life, the author of the Book of Proverhs writes: "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four, four which I know not: the way of the vultures in the air; the way of the snake upon a rock; the way of the ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a young woman. Likewise the way of the adulterous woman; she eats, and wipes her mouth, and says, I have done nothing wrong" (Prv 30: lS-20)Y While Wallach's allusion to the "Book of Wisdom" is clear, it is equally apparent that her Cecilia does not represent a woman in distress, as the external narrator determines ("she ... carefully wiped off her mouth / so that the ants won't come"). Nor is she a woman who is unable to find her way to the comprehensive world of men and therefor submits to sensual pleasures, as both Renan and Rattok conclude. On the contrary, as Cecilia's character continues to be evaluated by the narrator, we become aware of his or her conventional perspective, and Cecilia's freedom, impunity, and mental superiority become increasingly obvious.~8 In the image of the saint she is named after, this is a woman who holds herself up by means of her own senses, a human being with a divine mission she neither proclaims nor contains. ~') Although Cecilia's story is told in a (female) gender-saturated narrative, the power of the poem is in its quintessentially duplicitous discourse. As Wallach cunningly exposes the limits of the ideology within which she writes, the unique structure of her poem reveals a woman who assiduously defines her personal identity. Far from being a contained, indistinct "fog," her "Cecilia" is a woman who refuses to imprison reality in a rigid pecking-order but "alone dares and wishes to 57. Emphasis mine.

58. Surprisingly, Lily Rattok, who posits a divine mission as a key theme in Wallach's early poetry, does not realize the mental superiority of Cecilia or her missionarycharge. 59. Wallach's fascination with Christian practices (sainthood, celibacy, etc.) is a separate and fascinating topic that needs further exploration. She has evidently observed something "humane and forgiving" in the suffering images of Jesus Christ and in the entire culture of mental and physical manifestations of endless love and devotion Christian saints display (See, for example, her poem "Bourgeoisie" [llnU 1 in l:~urot, 12-13.)

126

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know from within ... [andllets the other language speak-the language of 1000 tongues which know neither enclosure nor death."60

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"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman" turn me on my stomach and put the Tefilin in my mouth a restraining bit ride on me I'm a female horse pull my head backwards until I scream of pain and you delighted afterwards I'll pass them on your body not hiding my intentions oh how mean my face will be I'll pass them slowly over your body slowly slowly slowly around your neck I'll pass them I'll turn them a few times around your neck, on one side and on the other side I'll tie them to something steady particularly very heavy maybe spinning I'll pull and pull until you expire until I strangle you totally with the Tefilin that string along the stage and among the startled audience

Staged as a trashy sex show, "Tefilin" renders a perverted and appalling scene in which a woman invites a man to engage in a kinky sexual act using the leather straps of the tefilin (phylacteries) as a sadomasochistic tooP4 Speaking in an instructive, yet utterly submissive voice, the woman promises to fully surrender her body to the man and consciously implores him to arouse, hurt, enslave, and degrade her with the straps of tefilin for his pleasure and gratification alone and with absolutely no regard for her feelings. However, when the man becomes ecstatic and submerged in a frenzied delight, another side of this woman suddenly emerges, as she passes the straps slowly over his body, then proceeds viciously to turn them a few times around his neck, finally choking him to death in front of the dumbfounded audience. It is certainly not surprising that "Tefilin" caused an unprecedented public uproar in Israel at the time it was first published in 1982. The tefilin, after all, are among the holiest and most sanctified of all religious 24. The tefilin are leather boxes and long straps that devout Jewish men attach to their foreheads and wrap tightly around their fingers, hands, and arms during morning prayers.

The Poetics and Politics of W'allach,~ Erotic Verse

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garbs and the most prominent of all Jewish symbols of reverence, piety, and devotion to God. Evidently intending to shock the reader in its obscene brutality, "Tefilin" outrages not only through its sacrilegious overtones but also through its pornographic and violent content. In fact, the staged event could easily incite shock and outrage through the sadomasochistic details alone. We should also note that within the context of Wallach's poetic oeuvre, "Tefilin" is an unusually lucid poem with no loose versification, no run-on sentences, no allusive themes or esoteric intertexts. In short, what is indeed "disturbing" in "Tefilin," to use Michael Riffaterre's term, is that it is much too "grammatical" and therefore perceived on its face as no more than a piece of cheap pornography.25 And yet, if the sale purpose of pornography is to arouse us sexually, Wallach s conscious use of the tefilin (instead of plain leather straps used in sadomasochistic activities) in fact shifts the reader's attention from the sexual atrocities to the single thing in it that entails spirituality and so transforms the entire poem into a subversive piece of literature that arouses us, as literature does, intellectually as well as emotionally.26 As a result, we must assume that Wallach's resorting to the pornographic imagination in her poetic work is aimed, as Susan Sontag argues, to "disorient" and "psychically dislocate" us as she effectively tries to say "something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often an unrecognizable form."zIt is well known that Jewish society from biblical times has been patriarchal. In that world Jewish women have occupied a position subordinate to that of the Jewish men, for authority, men believe, has been given to them by God, The discrimination between men and women in Judaism is particularly visible in rituals and practices. Women, together with minors and slaves, are excluded from practicing the most important mitsvot (commandments) that define a Jewish way of life and do not fully participate in religious services. In a traditional synagogue, women do not sit with men and are prohibited from wearing the ritual garb, 11'''\/ (prayer shawl), or donning the tefilin, which are a reminder for men to observe all God's laws and thereby achieve holiness. 2!! The 25. Riffatcrrc. Semiotics of Poetry, 1-4. 26. On thc uses of the pornographic imagination in Hebrew poetry, see Ariel Hirschfeld, "Sex in Language" [Heb.j,lton 77127 (August 1990): 38-39, 49. 27. Susan Sontag, "The Pornographic Imagination," A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, [1963 J 1982). 28. It was only in the United States in the early 1970s beginning with the Reform movement and followed in the 1980s by the Conservatives, that women became fully

144

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

requirement that tefilin be worn presumably stems from the Bible (although the word tefilin itself is not used), where it is said that a Jew should place signs [mmN] on the hand and between the eyes. 29 These signs, the Bible explains, are a "memorial... that the Lords Torah may be in thy mouth: for with a strong hand did the Lord bring thee out of Egypt." Nowhere in the Bible are women banned from wearing tefilin. In fact, the Talmud notes cases of women in biblical times who did wear them.3 0 The ban on women wearing the tefilin was decreed by Rabbinic law beginning only in the sixteenth century, when it was declared a male garment, and for that reason alone forbidden for women to wear.31 As Rul)ama Weiss-Goldman suggests, the ban on women donning the tefilin (which the Talmud and Rabbinic laws have a hard time explaining in strictly halakhic terms) could be related to the sexual nature of the commandment. 32 Performed in the synagogue early in the morning, the ritual of tefilin is a uniquely holy experience laden with erotic and sexual tension in which religious and phallic symbols intermingle. It begins by each arriving man rolling his sleeve, stretching his arm, hand, and middle finger, then vigorously proceeding to twist the tefilin straps around them as his whole body shakes and his lips murmur various biblical verses and blessings. The symbolism behind this ritual is that of a holy matrimony. While the ringlets that the twisted straps create stand for the intimate union between God and his chosen people, one of the key verses men are required to chant is perhaps one of the most "sexually suggestive" metaphors in biblical prophesy: "And I will betroth thee to me forever; and I will betroth thee to me in righteousness and in judgment, and in loyal love, and in mercies. And I will betroth thee to me in faithfulness; and thou shall know the Lord" (Hos 2:21-22).33 equal to men as they started to be ordained as rabbis. Women in the contemporary United States, even among the Orthodox community, for the past decade, are beginning to demand more participation in Jewish rituals. In israel, however, the topic is still hardly discussed and even though Israel is essentially a secular modern country, the ancient Jewish religious codes still affect women's status in Israeli society. 29. Ex 13:9 & 13:16; Dt 6:8 & 11:18. 30. Erul'in 96 notes that Michal, daughter of King Saul, donned tefilin. 31. Rabbi Moses Isserles in his commentary to the "Code of Jewish Law,- in Alfred J. Kolatch, The jewish Book of Why, 112. 32. Rul).ama Weiss-Goldman, "Women in Men's Commandments" I Heb.], Blessed Be He Who Made Me a Woman? [Heb.], David Yoel Ariel, Maya Leibovitch, and Yoram Mazor, eds. (Tel-Aviv: Miskal, 1999), 105-20. 33. For further information on the ritual and its significance see, for example,

The P()etics and P()litics of Wallach:,' Erotic Verse

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Once "Tefilin" is linked allusively with the Book of Hosea and its richly erotic metaphors, it hecomes apparent that for Wallach the release of a culturally taboo sexual imagination is justifiahle and legitimate if used for the sake of exposing infamy, suhverting injustice, teasing out universal truths, and restoring equity to the world. Like God in the Book of Hosea's metaphoric world, the woman in "Tefilin" directs the show and is the main actor in it. Like Him, she is vengeful and in her passionate fury consciously orders the man to "lewdly go astray" (Has 1:2), and when he does, she destroys him in public (cf. Has 2:5-12). It is hardly surprising that the woman featured in "Tefilin" is willing to sacrifice her hody and suffer the pain and mutilation the poem describes. From a female perspective, Jewish women have always been metonymically entrapped, enslaved, and degraded hy the tefilin-a prototypical distinguished and distinguishing]ewish men's tool and one of the main symbols of the intolerable gender arrangement in Judaism. As a woman, however, Wallach does not have either the power or the language to adequately render the extent of her feelings toward an object that has brought Jewish men so much pleasure and delight and women so much envy, pain, and rage. The woman she portrays evidently wants to sense this pain and pleasure on her own body and her own skin. She wants to feel the extent of the might men feel when the tefilin touch their bodies, to be enslaved physically by the same object that has caused her so much spiritual agony and pain. What she wants most is to expose the Jewish male's indulgence in the first place and to use his symbol in his destruction in the exact manner in which it has threatened to destroy her. In Alicia Ostriker's theory, what Wallach does is precisely what Ostriker famously recognizes as "stealing the language" and "reviSing the myth." For if tefilin are the male symbol of advantage and superiority, the woman in the poem cunningly, slowly, and painstakingly takes them out of the man's control and uses them not only to assert power over him, but also to bring upon him "death" by the same weapon that has been used for generations to restrain, smother, and repress women. 34 If repression breeds obsession, the voice of the repressed, as Ostriker argues, always erupts volcanically, and Wallach's "Tefilin" is certainly a volcanic piece of poetry. At the same time, however, it is an ingenious YM. Lau,Judaism - Theory and Practice [Heb.] Oerusalem: Masada, 1978), 29-36; Yona Metzger and Nachum Langentahl, The feu'ish Life Cycle [Heb.] (Tel-Aviv: Mishkal, 1988), 59-66 34. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 140.

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literary text coming from a poet who knows all too well that if she is to fight repression, it cannot be by a display of noble righteousness and moralistic argument. What she can do, to use Ostriker's words once again, is "entrap her audience in the ineluctable polarization in which she herself is trapped," and even if the poem "formally, conceptually and emotionally" is difficult to read, it has nevertheless proven to be "among the most impressive documents" that a woman poet has produced}) Come to me like a policeman

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40. This translation is mine. Cf. Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 52.

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he the law wear a wig on your giant head fuck me standing up insert in me so that Itl not know where I am these games that only you know to play otherwise I'll not remember that it was you otherwise Itl not know who you are make me know.

If a policeman is an executioner and his power is physical and material, the judge is the moral force behind the law. He has the authority and the supreme power to decide ones destiny for better or for worse, for pleasure or pain, for freedom or imprisonment. Wrapped in a black robe, a judge is a symbol of authority and superior dignity. On the other hand, a robe in and of itself symbolizes a veiling off from the world, as well as secrecy and magic powers.11 In other words, if the abstract concept of a robed judge stands for lawfulness, justice, and morality, his physical appearance suggests a disguise-a concealed identity or nature. In "When You Come ... Like a Judge," Wallach continues her exploration of the subversive potential of female masochism. Similar to the speaker in "Tefilin" and "When You Come ... Like a Policeman" the woman in this poem seems at first to be enthralled by the man's appearance and is ready to thrust her faith into his all-mighty hands. But she really is not. Viewing the judge's robe as merely another "social mask" and a symbol of unrestrained power, the female speaker is quick to assert that men tend to act their patriarchal roles and conceal their genuine nature ("you really like so much to disguise yourself / for every event you have another costume")' Her objective, therefore, is to discover the naked self underneath the robe. Curiously, however, her commanding voice does not order the man to rid himself of the costume altogetherthat is, of his symbol of authority. Instead, the female speaker proceeds to construct yet another explosive sexual fantasy. Contrary to the Violent, sadomasochistic acts featured in the preceding two poems, the jolting effects in "When You Come ... Like a Judge" stem from Wallach's unhindered use of an expletive, 'mN )"t (fuck me) and its vulgar implication. An essentially revisionist poeticS, this obscene use of language is shocking because it is antithetical to the Hebrew poetic aesthetics and because it comes from a woman in a poem by a female author. It defies a long tradition of gracious and/or digni41. See "cloak," Dictionary of Symbols.

152

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fied femininity and consequently provokes the anger and resentment that Wallach evidently desires. In her 1976 article "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helen Cixous, urging women to write and to write about themselves, emphatically argues the following: "Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the reverse-discourse ... aiming for the impossible, stop short before the word 'impossible' and write it as 'the end.'" When the "repressed" makes a comeback, Cixous adds, "it is an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with force never yet unleashed and equal to most forbidding suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence."42 For Wallach, it seems, the battle to be heard is as passionate as Cixous advocates. Her voice represents a woman who comes back from repression with enormous vengeance. The worst punishment for a woman, as Wallach alleges in this poem, is clearly to be "without identity like a stinky wanderer." With no identity, she maintains, existence is worthless, or, in her words, "a spiritual death." As a poet whose tool is the language, Wallach knows very well that for the sake of distinguishing herself and having her voice heard, all laws have to be broken. And what can be a better way of doing this than manipulating and exploiting the law-that is to say, the "justice" himself (rather than to plead and cry for justice). Joining the judge under the robe, the woman in "When You Come ... Like a Judge," seductive and vile, invites the male protagonist to "play the games" he so likes. She would engage in his fantasies, make him feel mighty and controlling-"be the law," as she says. She will make believe he won, as a decent woman would do. But in the image of the "criminal" or the "convict" that she portrays, the poem reveals that rather than an overt expression of the repressed fantasies of a demented mind, the portrayal of violent sexual intercourse is aimed at penetrating the law and conquering it too. The woman featured in the poem is determined to learn the source of the man's powers, and she is going to do it in her own way, by submitting and defying at the same time. She will praise his virility, remember his sexual performance as "outstanding." But in the end the voice that emerges from the poem is that of a woman who 42. From Ihe Women and Language Debate, 86.

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wishes to know the rules of the man's "games," and do whatever it takes to experience, and thus know, the secrets of his oppressive powers. As a feminist writer, Wallach, much like Cixous, strongly believes that if her goal is to form an independent identity, rewrite her own text, and make her own voice heard-if she is not to be effaced-she must challenge social, cultural, and language codes and ignore all moral barriers. Her personal reputation might be on the line, but if she gains, in the meantime, the literary attention that she desires, her mission will have been successfully accomplished.

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43. This translation is mine. Cf. Zisquit (trans.), Wild Light, 9.

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On first sight, there is a marked difference between the woman featured in "When You Come To Sleep With Me Like God " and the women featured in the three previous poems. Passionate as she appears, this woman is not involved in any brutal or vulgar obscenities. In fact , she seems to convey a reverent, subtle, delicate, and mostly submissive traditional female longing for a man. 44 Speaking in a timid vOice, her main wish, it seems, is to sustain the feeling of desire she experiences. She knows that desire can last only as long as it is unfulfilled and therefore wishes her man to be, as God, unattainable and indomitable. "When You Come ... Like God," nevertheless, is no less perverted than the previous poems in this series, for the mere association of God with a sexual act, even to a secular cynic, is quite astonishing and nothing short of blasphemy. Besides, even though the female voice in this poem seems to speak of a spiritual, rather than physical, contact ("come to me ... only in the wind"), there is enough evidence within the stirring water imagery to suggest the motions and sensations of a fleshy sexual act (''I'll be in deep waters;" "water down and up"). Furthermore, this poem's obViOUS association with other poems that simulate sexual intercourse with a man of power suggest that God, much like a policeman or a judge, for Wallach, is a fatal adversary she attempts to overcome. The water imagery that dominates "When You Come ... Like God" reinforces the motions of a sexual act as the opening line relays; and yet, it is also true that water, from time immemorial, symbolizes "the universal congress of potentialities, the fons et origo, which precedes all forms of creation ."45 This, of course, is the main implication of the water imagery in the biblical myth of creation, where the text clearly indicates that "the earth [in the beginning] was without form and void ... and the wind of God moved over the surface ofthe waters" (Gen 1:1-3). In the process of creating the world from these endless waters, God created the heaven and the earth, divided the upper and the lower waters, and then proceeded to create all else. The creation of mankind, as we know, appears in the Bible in two versions. In the first one, the text states briefly that on the sixth day "God created mankind in his own image .. . male and female he created them (Gen 1:27). The second mention of human creation nevertheless suggests that the first being-a male-was created first (Gen 2:7) and that the first female was formed as "a help 44. The adjectives in this sentence are borrowed from Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 3. 45. See "water," Dictionary a/Symbols.

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to match him" from his rib ([Y?:!I], Gen 2:20-25). This woman, as the myth goes, tempted the first man, Adam, to go astray and was consequently doomed by God to be ruled by men, as written: "Unto the woman He said ... thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Gen 3:16). Linked with the hiblical myth of creation, the woman in "When You Come ... Like God" is designed to submit authority to the ultimate theologian and then subvert it at the same time. In Wallach's world, God, the spiritual organizer of the universe and the source of all laws that regulate and control our lives, is, in Alicia Ostriker's words, "the ultimate patriarch." As such, He elicits from her both awe and anger at his masculine distance and power.46 Eager to transform the patriarchal structures that imprisoned her in the "oppressors language" and reinvent the image of Eve,4""' Wallach's protagonist desires to return to the state before all things were formed (immerse herself in "deep water") and "never return to the shore"-namely, to her earthly existence where a woman's life is "safe" but circumscribed. A closed, airless existence "under water" is her only way out of a suffocating life: the return to a fluid state and formlessness carries the promise of a new cosmic order and the rebirth of a wo/man-of-nature that the patriarchal myth of creation forged. From a psychological perspective, the idea of being locked up in an "underworld" and immersed in "oceanic feelings," represents perhaps what Kim Chernin believes is the early phase of ego-feelings, which allows a woman to discover the creative source in her womanhood. For if man lives in set rules-"the theses," in Wallach's wordsa woman is always "on the road." He knows. She learns. For him the world is formed. For her it is forming. For him life is being. For her it is becoming.48 To invite a man to a sexual encounter in which he assumes the image of God certainly takes courage. And yet, as Alicia Ostriker asserts, "as all roads in the Roman empire lead to Rome, all images oflogocentric male dominance in patriarchal society lead back to God." What a woman sees when she looks at God, "the ultimate patriarch" in Ostriker's words, is what she sees when she looks at the men in her life who are his "mortal representatives."49 For Wallach, to challenge God's authority is to sub46. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 136-38. 47. Ibid. II. 48. Kim Chernin, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search Of Herself (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). Cf. my analysis of Wallach's "Two Gardens" above. 49. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 137.

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vert a linguistically manufactured reality and proceed in a slow and painful process of inner search to recover the nature of the carnal woman that she is.

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Onanism Once again YOll slept with ~ister Man didn't love his empty look " and hugged his no body. 1

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Your lover's eyes look toward a foreign point not exactly toward you not at you, hes so young and already so bitter. The love that for a moment penetrated through your flesh fills your body and soul with heat from the edge of your hair to your internal organs, leaving you again with Mister Man not caressing with no hand your body that reacts with no emotion without expression to every caress without heat You have shown your poem to your young lover he reacts with anger and says its bad and not even a poem and turns his back, maybe he thinks hes no man, does he think he's no man? he doesn't understand poems, from feelings he demands too much, hours even five minutes of love is enough to fill up the needed warmth for a whole day, no man cools your feelings freezes your body, the chill spreads through your organs freezes your cheeks and sends a nervous quiver from the edge of the cheek to the opposite eye and destroys the emotional bloom and delivers a taste of pain to the gullet to the different parts of the neck and the back. You explain to your lover the meaning of time love, five minutes are like hours or maybe five, there are all kinds. It's worth while to take advantage of all the times when possible its impossible you know before work in the morning

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to love for three hours you need to warm up and all that

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you deliver a cold look toward no man and promise to meet him again in the evening for sure he'll return, he's the spiritual death he puts down the coldest look and stands by you waiting to catch with airy hands every feeling, to turn it to absolutely nothing. You have learned about your lover's gaze the two berries of his dark eyes that might deliver such a soft look as a memory of the taste of grapes, are watching in fury and more so with blind nervousness, which are so dangerous to the soft buds of the emotion and love. Will he be crazy you ask, will loose, spiritual movements upon his face show traces that you skillfully deCipher, letting out happy stretching out voices and happy ones, he's a momentary partner delivers a smile and you internalize him with self love takes him out and watches him like a jewel, he came out of the old poems and hes one of their heroes, also his beauty is like that, hes one of the wondrous names who were so lost in the quick terrified evolution in the womb of society, he'll be coming out of there even more monstrous will be reborn and will love you every morning as-he-should until he could,

The Poetics and P()litics of Wallach's Erotic Verse 71 72

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he'll get used to your hustling for its source is internal and rational otherwise she wouldn't have made out and been appropriate in all homey respectful perception as separating between what and how when and where, and his love will wear less dead forms, you'll submit to Mister No Man in the hard moments he'll freeze your fingers which caress you in different desires, but poems are only a technical matter which is acqUired during a lifetime the hero will live in every poetic form as a third person, or first or second,

he'll understand that too will live as first person, second or third 8'; the impression he makes is mainly that he 86 lives as a third person with himself 87 speaks of him as of he as somebody you get weary, 88 he speaks separating between himself and his sex 89 speaks of him as of he and these are not his feelings 90 this is someone else the sex in general the other man 91 that hes jealous of whom he fears, 92 the sex is he, he gives it to him 93 you are his mother you educate him 94 you give him back his self confidence 95 I meet with Mister No Man and learn about 96 other people about the other even though 97 he could possibly be many characters 98 you join his sex that was set apart 99 it's me feeling it's me feeling this, 100 me my body my soul myself and my own body, 101 he'll be cultivated will like operas and feelings, 102 will generalize with ease his own gender kind, 103 because the fruit of love is short living 104 much more than the fruits of a poem like this one. 83

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"Onanism," in Hebrew nm'N, from Tsurot (pp. 38-41), is one of Wallach's later, long "dramatic monologues." Its highly suggestive title, originally denoting the wasting of a male's semen (Gen 38:9), proposes at present sexual self-excitement, a private and concealed experience that

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is natural, yet deemed shameful. It is not, by any means, a common poetic title, nor a common word in any poetic diction. That Wallach would use a word like this in her poetry is probably no longer surprising. What is surprising is that after a "promise" to render yet another poem on a sexual, never-before-spoken-about topic, the very first part of "Onanism" (lines 1-17) appears to be what is commonly considered a "typical feminine" poem. 56 Rendered in basic structural units and arranged in a definite pattern of meter and rhyme scheme, these lines present the soft-spoken and lyrical voice of a frustrated female bemoaning the aftermath of a loveless sexual engagement with a young man. Through the short and emotionally charged lines the reader can easily sense the woman's pleasure and disappointment: the high moments of penetrating "love" and intense union and the low moments of total physical and spiritual disengagement, estrangement, and alienation. One can imagine the energizing feeling of being "filled with heat," of being whole and complete, as it is immediately contrasted with wearisome emptiness, absence, lack, and want. Unique combinations such as "his no body," "no hand," "no feeling," remind the Hebrew reader of the famous and soft affirming-through-negation lines by Wallach's renowned predecessor, Rai).el: "I didn't sing to you my country / didn't glorified your name ... ". Like Rai).el, Wallach's lines are so soft and yet so harsh, emotional but not sentimental, with the oppositions, artistically, so very well balanced. But "Onanism" is not a typically feminine lyrical poem: the first 17 lines are merely a prelude to a very long atypical manifesto, and the love-making experience it renders is once again a cunningly subversive scheme. The "prelude," in fact, already represents the duplicitous voice of a defiant female speaker. The male lover she ponders is on the one hand a sexually exploiting young "macho" who has absolutely no feelings nor regard for hers as soon as his desire has been satisfied. But, as the fifth stanza of the prelude indicates, this entire part of "Onanism" is in fact a poetic text the woman shows to her "young lover" who angrily rejects it ("he reacts with anger and says it's bad / and not even a poem and turns his back"). The realization that the speaker is a female poet who tries to bring to light her experiences as a woman in her poetic work redoubles the reader's sense of this woman's distress. For the man, we must realize, ignores her two most pressing needs as a woman: her need for love and her need for her own voice. But the featured poet is not a 56. Dan Miron's definition in rounding Mothers, Step Sisters.

1he Poetics and Politics of 'Wallach's Erotic H'rse

1 ()9

woman who seeks timidly to adjust her work to man-made literary standards. Thus she is hardly thwarted by his crude reaction. "Mr. Man," i)J 'l)'N, the man she slept with, in fact is not really the honorable and distinguished "master," as the Hebrew word '11:1 may have indicated initially, but rather a heartless, "bitter" antagonist, which is the other meaning of the word in. Furthermore, considering a less known meaning ofi1:l-a drop in a bucket of water-he is a man of little value or significance as wellY Or, as the speaker contemplates, altogether "no man," that is to say, not manly, not human, and definitively not the outstanding personality that the words "Mr. Man" ['lPN 11:1] ordinarily signifies. The speaker's questioning of the young mans "worth" as a man, as a lover, and as a literary authority is based on a tangible, bodily experience. The beautifully touching poem the speaker produced in the first four stanzas of "Onanism" was a direct result of the love that penetrated through her flesh filling "the body and the soul with heat / from the edge of your hair to your internal organs." Speaking in the impersonal "you," the "heat," that is to say, the excitability that love-making produces, in Wallach's world, is not a simple sexual gratification but a positive mental energy that inspires the mind. The conviction that bodily energies affect the minds productivity is precisely what puzzles the female speaker when she contemplates in the end of the fourth stanza the man's thinking of himself as "no man." This essentially philosophical contemplation, in turn, induces the transformation in the poetics of "Onanism" from the perfectly rhythmical lyrics of the first 16 lines to the following 88 lines of a flowing stream of consciousness. In other words, physical "heat" produced the beautiful creation that opens "Onanism." The rest of the poem, a reflective monologue, is a direct outcome of its absence. As vividly depicted in the seventh stanza of the poem, Wallach seems to realize that a creative woman faces existential danger (freezing mentally and dying away) precisely at the point of rejection. That is to say, the poet may be silenced when the female experience (of her involvement with a man) and her semiotics (the expression of the experience) are rigorously dismissed as "a no poem" solely because it deviates from the "standards," namely, from patriarchal ideology and cultural paradigms. The female poet Wallach portrays is able to outlive this dismissal and transcend it, preCisely because through the alchemical heat she experiences in the conjugal union, she has grown to understand that in 57. See Isa 40:14.

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order for her to survive, the literary standards must change and the existing paradigms ought to expand and make room for her. Asserting that the mans insufficient "warmth" and his body-mind schism affect his critical ability, the sixth stanza of "Onanism" denounces the enduring (patriarchal) endorsement of pure thought cut off from all the sensations of the body-which presumably impedes the soul's quest for truth. 58 A "feeling"-that is to say, a state of mind a poem tries to render-Wallach's speaker argues, is not an "abstract idea" you can design by some external rules, as the man reqUires ("from feelings he demands too much"), but the poets putting into words the mind's reaction to the energy the body is fed from without ("no man cools your feelings freezes / your body... "). While she writes her life as she/eels it, that is to say, perceives her world through physical association, her male critic uses abstract "rational" reasoning ("five minutes of love is enough ... "), which she elegantly ridicules. Acting as a tutor/instructor ("you explain to your lover the meaning of time / love"), the speaker's objective beginning in the eighth stanza is to "educate" the young man by changing "some [of his] opinions" and allowing him to "adjust" to a new "situation" in which the human libido substitutes for logic and convention in the creative process. 59 Smart as he is and quick to "get it," the speaker sees that making the young man surrender his well established bourgeoisie conventions ("it's not nice") is a frustrating experience for him ("he tries but gets disappointed"). But she "coolly" proceeds in her educational mission, warding off the freezing effect of his "airy hands" (ninth stanza). She is determined to instill in him the "soft buds of emotion and love" he nervously resists (tenth stanza). Able to detect minute "traces" of her effect on him, the emboldened speaker realizes that this beautiful, promising young man is a product of the mass production of "the womb of SOCiety" and is entrapped in societal/cultural structures that were imposed on him from the day he was born. Her challenge, therefore, is to kill the robot-like "monster" he was made to be and reconstruct a carefree authentic human being with

58. Recall Plato's words in his Phaedo Cp. 66a) "The person who is likely to succeed in his attempt [at seeking knowledge] most perfectly is the one who approaches each object, as much as possible with the unaided intellect... cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his body, as an impediment which by its presence prevents the soul from attaining truth." 59. Cf. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 95.

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an intrinsic ability to love as a conscious individual and not as the literary character he has been made to emulate (eleventh stanza). Referring to herself in the Hebrew text as ilm (whore), the speaker trusts that her young lover will finally learn that her excessive need for love-making, a despicable compulsion in societal terms, is innate, and therefore appropriate, even honorable, since it is the unfettered expression of the conscious living self (twelfth stanza). Furthermore, the speakers whorishness is a virtue, not just for a woman who knows how to satisfy herself sexually but for a poet too. Operating from the margins of society, she has no history, no tradition, and no heroes to follow, as he does-only herself to heed, only her body and consciousness to trust. It is this body and this consciousness that Wallach, consequently, lets speak for her in her poetry. This body and this consciousness are also a poetic source that are needed to regenerate the poetic utterance and revive its voice. For as her speaker argues in "Onanism" (thirteenth stanza), poetry writing at the present time is perceived solely as a "technical matter"-that is to say, an acquired technique or skill that takes learning (existing texts) and practicing (i.e., emulating them). Once he understands her nature and the source of her language and poetry, the speaker believes (fourteenth stanza), the man will begin to realize how standard language patterns have alienated him from his own reality, turning him into a social image of himself. 60 Furthermore, she is convinced that her "education" will restore the mans self-confidence, allowing him to finally have his own sense of self and the courage to pursue his pleasures (like operas and other "sentimental" things) even if they are socially unacceptable for a virile man. In structure and in theme, the poet featured in "Onanism," eVidently Wallach herself, emerges out of the confinement of unappreciated poetic strictures and also from a crude, non-gratifying love-making. She increasingly changes from the passive recipient of (no) love and (bad) criticism to an active and compassionate self-advocate. In no way, however, is her rise an act of retaliation, resentment, or rejection. Despite the mental anguish she has suffered, her liberation is not accompanied by wrath, but by openness, as she lets every part of her body speak with her and for her. Concerned solely with mental self-gratification, "Onanism" is devoid of irreverence, Violence, or perverted pornography. No longer infatuated with male authority and the source of men's power, 60. Wallach seems to echo Jacques Lacan's model of a "fading subject" whose ego is the introjected "Other." Bannet, Structuralism and the Culture of Dissent, 15-17.

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Wallach's sole objective in her later poems is to subvert the culture she has inherited by "liberating the fetters of her tongue" and letting the language inscribe her subliminal self and its authentic existence.

7 Whose Voice Is It Anyway:

The Dismantling of Mental and Social Systems in Wallach's Later Work I write my self in the annals of time The cover of Wallach's final collection, Mofa, features a contemporary piece of art by the Israeli artist Ofra Zimbelista containing a short poem in Wallach's own handwriting. Short, concise, and direct, this poem sheds much light on Wallach's later, longer, and highly complex poetry and the project of liberation she took upon herself in the last years of her life: 0")) '~ON' ~m~i1 )nJ"p :mi1 ''l' 'n~J Oi1~)'l'

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1 turned a life prisoner of the Kolbein I couple together both had planned all my steps, directed all my actions and controlled my consciousness I was never aware of how it happened that 1 became kind of a medium anyway I got out of there enriched with experience of a certain kind and I write me as the annals of time

Echoing some of the major dissenting voices that swept the academic world in the 1970s, this small poem illuminates what French Poststructuralist thinkers identified as mankinds main predicament: the individual's alienation from his or her authentic self.2 Alienation, Wallach suggests in this poem, is embedded in society and in all forms of authority that seek to shape and control our consciousness from the day we are born, turning us into a submissively conforming zombies (hypnotized "medium"). The years of Wallach's personal awakening and alleged recovery of an authentic self, a distinctive "I who is" ['0''0 ')N],3 as she writes in one of her last poems, constitute the bulk of her final two volumes (Tsurot and Mofa, 1985). Philosophical in nature, this poetry exposes the despotic effects of linguistic, literary, cultural, or historical conventions on the human mind and seeks for a wedge through which an ingenious indi-

1. Kot ['"p], in Hebrew, means voice; bein [P:1], in Hebrew, means in between. This ingenious name corresponds to the speaker's feeling like a "medium " who is controlled by forces of convention. 2. See Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic Of Dissent. 3. Wallach, Tat Hakara, 298. See n. 7.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway

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vidual can recreate his or her real self as an independent subject. 4 Refusing to be constrained by the critical literary establishment that "fettered her tongue," Wallach makes her inner experiences the centerfold of her aesthetics, so that her poems voice the authentic speech of her life and being.' As such, much of her later poetry is "catalogist," as Shimon Sandbank critically contends, yet intentionally SO.6 Poetry, Wallach believes, is the fluid, uncensored consciousness inscribing the annals of its own experiences as they are formulated in real time in the poet's mind? These are not my feelings

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4. Cf. Bannet, Structuralism and the Culture oJ Dissent, 2. 5. From "The Mute and the Nymph," MoJa , 142. The poem is translated and interpreted in Chapter Eight. 6. Shimon Sandbank, "I Don't Get Along With Your Consciousness" [Heb.], in Yediot Feb. 7, 1986. By "catalogist," Sandbank means that he deems the poems pointlessly long and excessive in details. 7. In one of her last poems, Wallach describes how poetry writing, an activity she allegedly performs without the control of the rational mind, results in a new self-an ''I" like no other - emerging from the utter chaos of the fluid unconscious: " I don 't feel / how write / its like a state of faint / I have no flesh / and I have no bones / and I have nothing / and only that alone / as if I'm the poorest / and the richest / and this is the gate to every state / of consciousness, a must, the necessary freedom and I that is" (Wallach, Tat Hakara , 298).

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A feeling, by definition, is an individuals impression of and reaction to an external event as it registers in the subliminal mind. People, we believe, naturally react differently to stimuli from without, for each of us has a unique emotional makeup and sensibility. In "Second Time, Second ChanCe" (Tsurot, pp. 121-24), Wallach mulls over this assumption. Featuring a first person female speaker, evidently the poet herself, the poem opens in the direct, determined, but resentful voice of a woman who is overcome with feelings that seem somewhat familiar to her but are definitely not hers. She immediately distinguishes between her own spiritual inheritance-n))J'O) ':mJl, deceased souls who have returned to earth in her body and are legitimately integrated in her consciousnessand an intruder's, whose invasion may be a menace to her authentic self. Reinstating her confidence in her peculiar way of knowing in two highlighted lines: 1))1D n~

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Ilaving a clear pictorial image in her mimL which has not yet heen "infected" with conventional speech and its traditional signification, the speaker vividly sees the intruder walking deliberately into her life and affecting her senses, her sensations, and feelings. Her main concern is that she may not be able to distinguish her feelings from the intruder's, for his trespassing threatens to hlur the vestiges of her personal life experiences as they were perceived in her virginal consciousness.

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"Loosen the Fetters of Ihy Tongue, Wr)lnan" a non-personal part, exactly alike I'm not you I'm not this literally this you can have this and me too perhaps in this sense we are alike exactly alike otherwise we're different totally in every other aspect we each use this within each other I use yours and you use mine

Testing the reader's numb senses, this stanza in Hebrew features the verb 1)))) (works) instead of i)))) (passes) in the first line,S at the same time suggesting that penetrating someone else's mind is not an easy task ("someone works in me like in a labyrinth like in a maze~). Or is it? This long and confusing stanza mirrors the speaker's quandary as she realizes that in spite of the complexity of each individual's consciousness and its personal nature ("a labyrinth a maze"), people share consciousness much like they share all else. Or perhaps, she wonders, they share all else because they somehow share a single consciousness, as if consciousness were some loose body part-though she knows that it really is not ("consciousness is in its place and does not wander")' As she continues to study the convergence of two separate consciousnesses and the unifying effects of that convergence, the speaker inadvertently proceeds to distinguish herself from the "intruder" as she delves into a philosophical contemplation of split personalities and multiple lives: "~~ ilt1~ '?~N

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perhaps you use mine only you not me 37 passing under my consciousness like under a bridge 3H you don't feel it or me its a mental connection 39 I could have used yours since you use mine 40 in fact you don't use mine you don't know how 41 you don't know that I know and so do I 42 that you can live my life 'H and I can revivify your life without you i\ and one can live other's life 45 and one can not live his own life no 46 and his entire life is linked to someone else's consciousness 47 and one's all life can come together elsewhere 48 one can be here and live elsewhere 49 one can not be here and live here so one can live in someone elses mind 51 one can be in more than one place 52 one can be a multitude 53 one has two feelings at the same time S4 someone is overcome with polluted feelings ss someone is overcome with crystal-clear ones 35

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Stating that the commingling of separate consciousnesses is mostly an involuntary occurrence that alienates individuals from themselves and their authentic feelings, Wallach's meditations in this first part of "Second Time, Second Chance" impart an essentially Poststructuralist sensibility that bemoans the communal nature of the individual. Playful and

180

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman"

repetitive, much like a Poststructuralist text, the voice that issues from the poem nevertheless refuses to succumb to the invasion of the "Wholly Other" or allow him to contaminate her clear senses.') Stepping out of the logical thinking that conventionally perceives feelings in relative, binary terms such as good/bad, happy/sad, strong/vague-the speaker distinguishes the multiple feelings inside an individual with natural colors and patterns in the next stanza of the poem: O~jJ1~ . -..:

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9. On the "Wholly Other," or the alien within, see the works ofjacques Derrida. For an English summary of Derrida's theory, see Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic o/Dissent,184-227.

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Shutting ones consciousness to external influences, we realize in this part of the poem, is necessary for a return to a paradisiacal state of bliss such as that of the original man and woman: not yet burdened by common knowledge, they were able to sense desire and respond to it instinctually without fearing the consequences, The voice that penetrates our minds telling us what is right and what is wrong and how to lead a

182

"Loosen the Fetters of Thy Tongue, Woman "

morally responsible life is always a voice from without, the speaker asserts, and its sole objective is to suppress our innate desires. Probably referring to the Freudian "superego," whose despotic rein Wallach vividly describes elsewhere in Tsurot, IO the speaker in "Second Time, Second Chance" renounces the moral prohibitions that inhibit our natural impulses. She disregards the threat of a social anarchy ["P!lil] that the rejection of the superego entails. With her superior "optical" abilities intact, the speaker realizes that understanding the psychological processes that affect and infect our consciousness is the end of self destruction and the restoration of the intuitive perception ("self evident" [):mJ ,lln'OJ]) of our pre-nurtured mind. Continuing in the past tense, she observes that the agent of inhibitions that passed through her life is but a small and insignificant "microbe man" [p1))n], an infectious organism that continues to spread and destroy the wholeness of everyone he touches:" 1n'n :l:l 'mJ 1J).! m'b'n .,'

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