The Vigil

Bat-Hamah was born Malka Yosifnova Shechtman in Lipniki, Volhynia, Ukraine. She grew up speaking Yiddish with her mother and Hebrew with her father, a forester. Bat-Hamah worked as the assistant director of the Kiev Jewish theater while writing Hebrew poetry as a member of the Hebraic-communist Hebrew Octobrists. Her poetry was smuggled from Kiev into Palestine, where it was published in newspapers and periodicals, including Ha-Shiloaḥ, Hedim, Davar, and Geḥalim loḥashot. Her Sephardic Hebrew was an amalgam of colloquialisms and literary idiom. She destroyed much of her work in 1937 fearing the anti-Zionist climate of the Soviet Union. Her poetry was rediscovered in the mid-1970s in letters she had sent to friends outside of the Soviet Union. She is recognized for her original style and female voice, which often spoke against patriarchal norms in alternative, empowering sexuality. A work of note is her “The Harlot” (1922).