Vox Populi
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Chana Bloch: The New World
My uncle killed a man and was proud of it.
Some punk with a knife came at him in Flatbush
and he knocked the sucker to the ground.
The sidewalk finished the job.
By then he’d survived two wives
and a triple bypass. He carried
a bit of the plastic tubing in his pocket
and would show it to anyone.
He’d unbutton his shirt right there on the street
and show off the scar.
As a boy, he watched a drunken Cossack
go after his father with an ax.
His sister tried to staunch the bleeding
with a hunk of dry bread.
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 bitter drive to Brooklyn every Sunday
when I was a child—
Uncle George in the doorway snorting and laughing,
I’m gonna take a bite of your little behind.
He was a good-looker in a pin-striped suit
and wingtip shoes.
This is America, we don’t live
in the Dark Ages anymore, honey.
This is a free country.
~~~~
Chana Bloch (1940 – 2017) was a poet, translator, and scholar. Born as Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York, she was a second-generation American, the daughter of Benjamin and Rose (née Rosenberg) Faerstein; her parents were both observant Jews who had immigrated from Ukraine. Bloch taught at Mills College for over thirty years and directed their Creative Writing Program. Bloch published five collections of her poetry: The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, Blood Honey, Swimming in the Rain and The Moon Is Almost Full. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation and Best American Poetry, She was co-translator, with Ariel Bloch, of the biblical Song of Songs. She co-translated works by modern Hebrew poets including Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Chana’s Story, a song cycle by David Del Tredici based on her work, premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Poem copyright 2008 Chana Bloch. From Blood Honey (Autumn House, 2008).
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When pain knocked, they opened the door. I love her work, especially her translations of The Song of Solomon.
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Oh yes, I love Chana’s poems and translations.
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Wonderful ❤️❤️❤️❤️Sent from my iPhone
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What Maro says: ‘a great hard-ass poem’. The details making it almost as real as it would have been for the writer. These tough old people (who also once were young) existed in my life too. The old women: “We said it when Hitler was in power, and we’ll say when Stalin is in power. What more can they do to us?” and went and harvested from their little garden so we kids had something to eat. And the forever illusion of being ‘free’.
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I know what you mean, Rose Mary. My wife’s parents were children in Germany during the war. They almost starved to death while surviving bombs dropped on their homes. My grandmother was an Irish-Cherokee who was one of 12 children working on a cotton share-crop in Texas. Life is hard for most people, and everyday I thank the god of dumb luck for giving me my comfortable life.
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What a powerful and sobering poem.
I respect her courageous translations of Yehuda Amichai – although nobody can really translate them…I always wish the world could read his poetry in Hebrew to gain their extraordinary depths, sound, and subtlety.
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I have been a big fan of Chana’s translations of Amichai since I was in college, so when she called and asked whether Autumn House could publish Blood Honey, I was thrilled. AHP went on to publish three of her books before she died. She was a great friend, a beautiful soul and a brilliant scholar.
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Yes, how wonderful that you knew her. I often wish I’d had the privilege of meeting her. I understand that many people love her translations, which is really important, Yehuda Amichai is a stupendous poet. I simply know the Hebrew and nothing can compare with it. Which is why I think she had such courage to take that on.
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I love the blazing honesty in her last book The Moon is Always Full. She left too soon.
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Yes, too soon. Chana wrote her best poems in the last ten years of her life.
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Great hard ass poem as ever from Chana Bloch but..WE DO — LIVE IN THE DARK AGES STILL. ALAS. AND MORE THAN OUR UNCLE GEORGES KNOW THAT to be so. ALAS. if wishes were horses, we might live in a light world. But t’aint so, not then, not now. :((
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I’m afraid you’re right, Margo. We live in the Dark Ages.
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An astounding poem with that ironic “this is America honey—we live in a free country,” becoming less true every moment. Again, the almost hydraulic evocations in her fabulous lines bring forth a powerful poetry!
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Despite the terrible suffering her people have gone through, Chana was an advocate for peace. Although I miss her, I’m grateful she doesn’t have to witness the horrors that her beloved Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians.
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