The Poetry of a Jewish Humanist

A child of immigrant parents who was raised in an observant Jewish household, poet Chana Bloch has absorbed the details of her ethnic and linguistic heritage; this includes what she has called “the habit of questioning,” which is “not only sanctioned by Jewish tradition, it’s an honored part of it.” As a poet, biblical scholar, and translator of ancient and modern Hebrew poetry, she has followed her teacher Robert Lowell’s advice to “learn to write from [her] own translations.”

Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems demonstrates that Bloch has converted that important lesson into a unique poetic voice that modulates from the homespun to the literary and shifts from wit and humor to a pull-no-punches toughness. Spare and musical, intimate while open to history, intelligent and emotionally rich in the details of divisions and connections, Bloch’s poetry negotiates the complexities of her identity as a first-generation Jew, a woman, a child, a parent, a wife, a lover, and a citizen.

A self-proclaimed “Jewish humanist,” Bloch quarrels with tradition by asking why God has to make divisions. Some of the divisions she writes about include those between husband and wife, parents and children, illness and health, historical memory and momentary joy, and the contradictions within Judaism itself. Bloch critiques these divisions and, when she finds them, offers alternatives that are more inclusive and more humanistic. The advantage of a career-spanning collection is that it shows how these themes echo and expand consistently within her work. In “Furniture,” from her first collection, The Secrets of the Tribe (1980), the speaker’s mother claims that “God will punish” her if she writes on Shabbos. The speaker responds: “When I wrote, I pulled down the shade.” A later poem, “The Dark of Day,” from Blood Honey (2009), is more explicit:

The rabbis taught us the mathematics of dividing this from that. They certified the micro-moment when day tips over into night: When the third star presents itself in the sky. They drew a line through that eye of light, a longitude. You’ve got to navigate the evening blessing with precision, not one star too soon.

Bloch immediately follows with the alternative perspective — that nature can’t be so evenly divided: “But night comes on slowly. / It takes all day.” The poem then takes a dramatic turn, shifting to the poet’s friend’s father, who was “killed / in a car crash”; though her friend “hadn’t seen him in years,” she nevertheless “tore out a stain” of blood she had found on his “open notebook . . . and took it into her mouth.” Bloch’s initial critique of rabbinic law opens to a devastating insight into the maze of emotions that we cannot navigate “with precision.” This powerful critique becomes self-referential in the title poem, “Swimming in the Rain,” in which the speaker, instead of “pulling down the shade,” can unabashedly declare: “Thank God / I’ve got the good sense at last // not to come in out of the rain,” as it “falls . . . onto the face of the deep as it did / on the first day // before the dividing began.” The poet is wise enough to know that “Half the stories / [she] used to believe are false.” Though the connection — where the rain falls into the ocean — is momentary, Bloch’s wry phrasing expresses a hard-earned maturation of her singular and self-assured voice.

Though Bloch no longer lives in the religiously observant world embodied by her parents and ancestry, she captures it with affection and poignancy. “Exile” (from Secrets of the Tribe) and “Hester Street, 1898,” (a new poem from Swimming in the Rain), convey an innocence lost. In the older piece, it’s “the ten lost tribes,” who, she claims, by becoming modern Jews, have lost their chosen-ness. In the new poem, the loss is of a different kind: the immigrant’s hopeful dream of the future, which “they believed . . . they taught diligently / onto their children, / who taught it to me.” The speaker...