Ruth Jordan; Award-Winning Biographer

Ruth Jordan, 72, biographer who chronicled her Palestine childhood in “Daughter of the Waves.” Miss Jordan’s 1982 autobiography won the Kenneth B. Smilen Award as the outstanding book with a Jewish theme published the United States. She wrote several biographies, including those of author George Sand and composer Frederic Chopin. Her latest work, “Halevy, His Music and Times,” about opera composer Jacques Fromental Halevy, is scheduled for publication in May. She worked in the Hebrew section of the BBC World Service. On March 17 in London of cancer.