Yona Wallach (; June 10, 1944 – September 26, 1985) was an Israeli poet. Her surname also appears as Volach. She is considered a revolutionary Israeli feminist and post-modernist. Wallach was a promising young poet, though she neglected her talents for many years as she used drugs and explored the Jewish mysticism that influenced much of her work. She didn't receive critical acclaim for her work until the late 70s. Wallach developed breast cancer in 1981 and refused treatment for many years. She died in 1985. Biography Early life Yona Wallach was born on June 10, 1944 in Kiryat Ono to parents Michael and Esther Wallach. The name Yona was given to her in honor of three dead relatives. At the age of four, her father was brutally tortured and killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Wallach and her older sister Nira were raised by their widowed mother on Michael Wallach Street in the town of Kiryat Ono — a town which her father founded near Tel Aviv. As a young child Wallach did well in elementary school, but as she grew older she became more rebellious, dressing androgynously in her dead father's clothes and having her first abortion at age sixteen. She was expelled from high school after tenth grade, and then spent a short time at the Avni Arts School. Around the age of nineteen she left home for Jerusalem. Although she never received formal higher education, she was very observant and an avid reader, claiming to have learned from the world around her. She began to associate with petty thieves and drug dealers, intrigued by their lifestyle and the ugly reality of the world. Psychiatric hospitalization and sexuality Wallach suffered from a few mental breakdowns, the first of which occurred in her late teens. She claims to have freely admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital around the age of twenty to better understand the madness her friends were experiencing, but in reality she agreed to be admitted after developing impulses to harm her mother. At the mental institution she met a doctor who took advantage of her willingness to use drugs and treated her with LSD therapy, though he too was inexperienced with dosages and once almost killed her through an overdose. She enjoyed using psychotics and described the hallucinations as having expanded her consciousness. Her therapist at the institution acknowledged her deviant sexuality in his records,