Dalven's parents, Israel and Esther, moved to New York in 1909 with their two children, Joseph and Rachel, leaving their other daughter, Simcha (Sophie) with relatives in Greece due to an eye infection that would have prevented her admission to the U.S. Dalven went on to graduate from Hunter College and subsequently earned a doctorate in English at New York University.
[3][4] Dalven's career as a translator began with the poems of her nephew by marriage, Joseph Eliya [el], who died in 1931, after learning about him from a cousin that sparked their correspondence for the last three years of his life.
The notes and impressions she recorded eventually became the foundation for her future books and plays about the Romaniote community of Ioannina.
She wrote four autobiographical plays: Marriages are Arranged in Heaven, Our Kind of People, A Matter of Survival, and Esther.
Poets in the anthology included Ioanna Tsatsou, née Seferiádou, the wife of Konstantinos Tsatsos and sister of Giorgos Seferis; Victoria Theodorou, who chronicled the Greek Civil War; and Nana Issaia, the Romaniote poet and painter who translated Sylvia Plath into Greek.