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The Poetry of a Jewish Humanist

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3140236

2164-0041

Philip Terman,

Jewish Identity and Society

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 dividingthis from that. They certifiedthe micro-moment when day tips overinto 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 blessingwith 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 reflects to her sons that she “can’t give [them] that.” Loss of chosen-ness, loss of immigrant hope: Bloch skillfully preserves the vitality of that world and its inhabitants, tenderly capturing them in all their complexities and contradictions. In “The Converts,” the poet’s irony is in full force as she observes the converted Jews’ obsessive devotion at a Yom Kippur service, while the “normal” Jews dream of escaping: “If they go on loving that way, we’ll be here all night.” The poet asks: “did they think / we were happier?” Bloch is wise enough to know that Jews don’t have “the lost words / to open God’s mouth” any more than anyone else does, and she’s smart in the tartness of voice that says so.On the subject of happiness, Bloch has much to say, perhaps because, given the realistic territory within which her poetry operates, “happiness” isn’t quite so simple as it seems. Particularly admirable is her voice — honest and intimate in its formal familiarity. In “Primer,” Bloch questions, with her typically tragicomic wit, the nostalgia of the “happy childhood,” asking “If we were so happy, / why weren’t we happy?” When Bloch revisits the subject of happiness as reflected in her parents’ long marriage, she presents the subtleties and complexities by contrasting the “noisy bedsprings” with the “clashing-and-carping, nagging-and-clamoring.” In this poem, set “in the cancer ward,” she brings us inside her parents’ marriage with an irresistible joke:Out in the corridor she outdid his story:“Daddy wanted to make love.I told him. But honey, your back!”You know what your father answered?There’s nothing wrong with my front.”The joke resonates in the last stanza, as the speaker watches her mother shave her father “in the hospital bed … stroking his cheek with the razor.” Here Bloch conveys the mishmash — arguments and jokes, delicacy and confusion — that makes up a marriage.In Bloch’s fourth collection, Blood Honey, some of the strongest poems articulate the tension between the old and new world. As in all her work, she writes against sentimentality and nostalgia, depicting a world in which her uncle “killed a man and was proud of it.” Here, she provides a succinct, pungent description of the old country:That’s the old country for you:they ate with their hands, went hungry to bed,slept in their stink. When pain knocked,they opened the door.“The past keeps changing” becomes a central theme throughout Bloch’s oeuvre, as we follow the permutations of how the speaker attends to that past. Like an unknown friend, we learn the multifaceted details about Bloch’s first marriage and painful divorce, her happy second marriage, the birth and development of her children, and her responses to, among other concerns, art, the environment, the Holocaust, friendships, love and sexuality, history, illness, and aging. Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems is an epic compendium of one Jewish American woman’s poetic journey that reaches back to the Bible and into the present moment. It offers a deep appreciation of the present as an antidote to the divisions that often accost us, as a joy within our reach, as suggested in the poem, “Happiness Research”:“Even in the slums of Calcuttapeople on the street describe themselvesas reasonably happy.” Why notbe reasonable? why not in Berkeley? why notright now, sweetheart, while the rainis stroking the roof?In Bloch’s poems we hear echoes of Yehuda Amichai’s brilliant use of metaphor and Dahlia Ravikovitch’s mixture of the personal and political. We also hear echoes of Emily Dickinson’s clean, spare intensity, Elizabeth Bishop’s formalized wit, and Sylvia Plath’s controlled music. Though not a formalist, Bloch writes poetry that is formally shaped, offering a balance of story and song, keeping to language and truth in the way she describes her poet friend Mark O’Brien, who was paralyzed with polio and required an iron lung. As Bloch observes, O’Brien composed his poems:… letter by letteron a propped keyboard, the mouth-stickwobbling between his teeth.That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable.He won’t ever say “The grass is very green”when it’s only green.Likewise, Bloch’s poems are consistent in their concision, not often wavering from four to six self-contained stanzas of shortish lines. Much of the pleasure of reading her is coming across the epigrammatic lines that often surprise us, epiphany-like, at the poem’s end. “The Converts” provides a good example: “and I covet / what they think we’ve got.” In “Brothers,” the speaker reads a story to her two young children about the legendary witch, Baba Yaga, scaring them silly and chasing them around the house, threatening to eat them. Instead of the playful frenzy she expects, one of the boys cries in a “stricken voice” to her to “Eat him! / Eat my brother.”Though Bloch is consistent in her use of form, there are variations and expansions in both theme and style from book to book; the poems in the new section offer new formal arrangements (“The Revised Version” and “Dispatches From the Tourist Bureau”) and a wider reach of subjects, especially those involving history (“The Hall of Human Origins,” “Hester Street, 1898,” “Summer in the City, 1947,” and “July in the Bronx, 1971”). Alongside her contemporaries Alicia Ostriker and Marge Piercy, Chana Bloch continues to provide a forceful poetic critique of traditional Jewish identity and the limitations of divisions in a tone that registers the full range of experience. Ambitious in scope, wide-ranging in subject, and attentive to the fault lines of history and the human heart, Swimming in the Rain is an essential contribution to American poetry.