Swimming in the Rain

Chana Bloch was born Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York on March 15, 1940. She received a bachelor's degree in Semitic studies from Cornell University in 1961 and two master's degrees from Brandeis University, in Near Eastern and Judaic studies in 1963 and in English literature in 1965. She taught English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for several years. This experience led to her translation work including two volumes of poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch entitled A Dress of Fire and The Window; The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai translated with Stephen Mitchell; Amichai's Open Closed Open translated with Chana Kronfeld; and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch.

She received a doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975. In 1985, her dissertation was published as Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. She wrote several collections of poetry including The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, Blood Honey, The Moon Is Almost Full, and Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015. She taught at Mills College in Oakland from 1973 until her retirement in 2005. She died from complications of sarcoma on May 19, 2017 at the age of 77.

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