The two Israeli poets Yona Wallach (1944–1985) and Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (1914–1984) – known simply as Zelda – were born almost on the same date but thirty years apart. Yona was born on June 10, 1944, and Zelda on June 20, 1914. Yet Wallach published her first book a year before Zelda’s debut collection appeared. Zelda was 53 when her first book, Pnai (“Leisure”), was published, and it caused a stir in the literary world.
It was the young Wallach who discovered Zelda and brought her onto the Hebrew poetry scene, having come to know the older poet through their mutual friend, the essayist, literary critic and translator Azah Zvi (1934-2011). Zvi, who was Zelda’s neighbor in Jerusalem, told Yona Wallach that she simply had to meet a remarkable woman: a Chabad follower, a cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a poetry writer, and an unusual figure. Wallach came to visit the Jerusalem poet, and Zelda read her poems from the many notes scattered around her home, on which she had jotted down her verses. Zvi recounts that Wallach was stunned. “Why are these things just scattered around like this?” she asked. Wallach was adamant that they need to be collected and compiled into a book.
By the end of the visit, Wallach had instructed Zvi to type up the poems on her typewriter and thanked her for introducing her to this wonderful woman. Thus began the publication of Zelda’s first collection of poems.
Very different temperaments
The connection between Wallach and Zelda, as Zvi recounted, did not last many years. The two poets’ very different temperaments, along with the gap in age and outlook, kept them from becoming close friends. And yet, the story of their bond became one of the most beloved legends in the world of Hebrew poetry. A young poet, a Tel Aviv rebel known for her blunt, provocative poems, Wallach brought into Hebrew poetry an unapologetic feminine voice about sex, gender fluidity, and the spirituality of the counterculture. The fact that she connected with the older poet, a Jerusalemite, a Chabad woman who barely dared leave her house, a woman who called herself “simple, domestic, feeble”, and recognized her immense talent, is remarkable.
What was the secret of the connection between the two? One cannot ignore the historical moment in which they created and met: Israel of the late 1960s. In the United States, these were “the sixties”: years of war and protest against war, a plunge into psychedelia, and a search for alternative spirituality. Just as young Americans sought out unusual spiritual figures, gurus from East and West (Carlebach, for instance, as a Jewish example of the phenomenon), so too in Israel, Zelda’s mysterious figure – a woman of spirituality and holiness – seems to have drawn in the young Wallach, who was in the midst of an ongoing spiritual and consciousness-driven search.
A deeper point of resemblance
Later, in the early 1970s, the Yom Kippur War broke out, leaving Israeli society wounded, grieving, and searching for comfort. Out of this crisis, a space opened up in secular cultural consciousness for the realms of the spirit. Spiritual poetry like Zelda’s ceased to be seen as an embarrassing relic of an older generation and became a modern response to pains that have no cure. But perhaps it wasn’t only the historical context that made this special connection possible. Perhaps Yona and Zelda were not so different from each other after all. Perhaps there was a deeper point of resemblance between them than first appears.
One of Zelda’s most famous poems is Shnei Yesodot (“Two Elements”), in which a conversation takes place between the flame and the cypress tree. The flame claims that the cypress lives a life devoid of madness, devoid of spirituality, imagination, and freedom. The cypress does not answer her, because it knows, as the poet writes, that it possesses all of these, but the flame does not understand and does not believe it. This poem is usually read as an encounter between Yona and Zelda, between the stormy, burning poet and the settled, seemingly quiet one. But if we listen closely, we discover that both elements already exist within the cypress itself: it contains abandon, it contains freedom, it contains imagination. In another poem, Zelda testifies that only a thin line separates good from evil within her heart. She describes how she clings to the Torah, to an ordered and normal life, precisely out of a clear awareness that within her also lies the possibility of losing all footing and running unrestrained.
In other words, whoever reads Zelda’s poems encounters, again and again, testimony to a turbulent inner life, a burning soul, and an unceasing spiritual search. The settled way in which she lived her life was, it seems, an outward appearance – whether by choice or by necessity – masking an inner world full of fire and imagination, a world that, in the end, does not sound so different from the inner storm of her supposed antithesis, Yona Wallach.
This article was originally published in Hebrew.
Main Photo: Zelda, by Aliza Auerbach