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Yona Wallach was born in 1944 in Tel Aviv and never travelled outside Israel\'s borders. Eleven collections of her poetry\\xa0have been published during her lifetime and posthumously,\\xa0and many of her songs have been put to music. She also wrote for and joined a rock band. Though she died in 1985 of breast cancer at the age of 41, she is still very much present in Tel Aviv.

Never one to shy away from controversy, her provocative (some would say pornographic) poem \'Tefillin\' created a public storm and ruined her close friendship with fellow poet Zelda.\\xa0Wallach certainly made an astonishing impact on Hebrew literature during her short life, ushering in a feminist revolution in Israeli poetry and\\xa0revolutionizing literary Hebrew to include the sounds of the twentieth century.

In her poem \'Hebrew,\' from which host Marcela Sulak reads, she calls the Hebrew language a "sex maniac" because all nouns have a gender: "She wants to know who\\u2019s speaking / almost a vision almost an image / what\\u2019s forbidden in the whole Torah / or at least to see the sex / Hebrew peeks through they keyhole."

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Text:

Yona Wallach, Let the Words: Selected Poems, translated by Linda Stern Zisquit. The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006.

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Music:

\'Ayala\' by Yona Wallach. Performed by Alma.

\'I couldn\\u2019t do anything with it\' by Yona Wallach. Performed by Ninet Tayeb.