Biography

She was born in Sondershausen

Sondershausen

Sondershausen is a town in Thuringia, Germany, capital of the Kyffhäuserkreis district, situated about 50 km north of Erfurt. On 1 December 2007, the former municipality Schernberg was incorporated by Sondershausen....

, Thuringia

Thuringia

The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....

, and educated in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 and London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. She was the third child of John (or Jacob) Bloch of Egbaston, Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, editor of the German sporting journal Spiel und Sport (1891–1901).

She settled in London after the First World War and in 1919 launched a public appeal for the formation in England of a Jewish arts and crafts society. She contributed essays, stories and poems to a number of periodicals, and wrote articles and prose fiction for both Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers and publications in the United States, England and the British colonies. Some confusion was caused when it was wrongly claimed that Regina Miriam Bloch was the real name of Rebecca West

Rebecca West

Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...

.

She was noted for a compact treatise she wrote on the life of Hazrat Inayat Khan and his mission to the West. She was interested in mysticism

Mysticism

Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

 and contributed articles and book reviews to the Occult Review.

She died in London aged 49.

Selected works

• The Book of Strange Loves (1918)

• The Confessions of Inayat Khan (1915)

• The Swine-Gods and Other Visions, With a foreword by Israel Zangwill
  Israel Zangwill
  Israel Zangwill was a British humorist and writer.-Biography:Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing...
  
  (1917)

• The Vision of the King: a Coronation Souvenir (1911)

External links to poems

• "Solomon's Song", in Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse, 1917 http://www.bartleby.com/98/118.html

• "I Know a Ruined Garden" in The Second Book of the Poets' Club (1911) p. 40 http://www.archive.org/stream/secondbookofpoet00poet#page/40/mode/2up