Adele Wiseman
Adele Wiseman was a notable Canadian author born on May 21, 1928, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents. Growing up in a working-class environment during the Great Depression, Wiseman was deeply influenced by her family's storytelling tradition and the rich cultural narratives of her Jewish heritage. She pursued higher education at the University of Manitoba, where she graduated with honors in English and psychology in 1949. Wiseman gained critical acclaim with her debut novel, *The Sacrifice* (1956), which explores the immigrant experience through the lens of an Orthodox Jewish man's moral struggles in a modern context, winning the Governor General's Award for fiction.
After a long hiatus, she published her second novel, *Crackpot* (1974), which offers a contrasting perspective through the life of a comically exuberant Jewish prostitute, highlighting themes of vulnerability and historical trauma. Beyond novels, Wiseman also contributed to children's literature and taught creative writing at various institutions. Her later works focused on memoir, reflecting on her childhood and the complexities of Jewish identity and family bonds. Wiseman passed away on June 1, 1992, in Toronto, leaving behind a legacy that intertwines personal narrative with broader themes of identity, memory, and the immigrant experience.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Adele Wiseman
Writer
- Born: May 21, 1928
- Birthplace: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- Died: June 1, 1992
- Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Biography
Adele Wiseman was born to Pesach (Peter) and Chaika (Clara) Waisman on May 21, 1928, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her parents, Ukrainian Jews, had emigrated to the ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods of North Winnipeg during the height of the pogroms in Stalinist Russia. Amid the difficult economic circumstances during the heart of the Depression (Wiseman’s parents ran a small tailoring shop), Wiseman grew up listening to the rich trove of Jewish tales her family relished relating. A voracious reader but indifferent to the experience of public school, Wiseman found the joy of the academic experience only when she attended the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1949 with honors with a B.A. in English and psychology. Certain she would write, Wiseman traveled over the next several years, living briefly in London and Rome before returning to Winnipeg to complete her first novel while she worked for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
The Sacrifice, published in 1956, won Wiseman immediate critical acclaim for its compassionate awareness of the immigrant experience as well as its sensitive transposition of Biblical materials—specifically, the Old Testament story of Abraham—into a contemporary context. Wiseman develops a modern-day parable, the story of an elderly Depression-era Orthodox Jewish immigrant in Winnipeg who had fled the persecutions in Eastern Europe and who now struggles to understand the logic of God’s plan that permits such suffering for his chosen people. A loving family man, he will face a difficult moral dilemma when he is responsible for the death of a morally lax divorcée. The story, rich with resonant symbols and sustained by a moral gravitas, earned Wiseman the coveted Governor General’s Award for the outstanding work of Canadian fiction.
It would be close to twenty years before Wiseman would publish her second novel. In that time, she wrote children’s stories and a play but devoted much of her time to teaching creative writing at MacDonald College at Montreal’s McGill University and later at the Banff Centre in Alberta. Her second novel, Crackpot (1974), something of a counterpoint to The Sacrifice, is the comic, often irreverent story of an exuberant and wildly overweight Jewish prostitute (and mother) in Winnipeg who is shaped by the same horrific history of persecution and suffering (specifically the experience of the Holocaust and the fierce struggle for a Jewish homeland after the war) but who finds her way to affirm the difficult virtue of vulnerability and the value of suffering. Wiseman next turned to her own experience to craft several loving recollections of her childhood and particularly the profound influence of her mother. As a memoirist, Wiseman sees the challenge in the Jewish experience of immigration and assimilation and offers the importance of the Old World bond of family and the ancient sense of community.
Wiseman died June 1, 1992, in Toronto from complications from cancer. In whatever genre, Wiseman drew on her working-class Jewish background to remind her readers of the complex relationship between identity and recollection and the intricate dynamic between the imagination and history in any construction of a moral self.