Author: Adele Wiseman

Adele Wiseman was the daughter of Jewish immigrants who left Ukraine for Winnipeg during the upheaval of the Russian Civil War, and her fiction stays inside the working-class North End where they settled. She took a degree in English and psychology at Manitoba in 1949, and The Sacrifice, published in 1956, won the Governor General's Award for fiction: it reworks the story of Abraham and Isaac through an immigrant father whose new-world life comes apart. Eighteen years passed before Crackpot (1974), a comic novel by contrast, built around Hoda, the vast and irrepressible daughter of a blind father and a hunchbacked mother, getting by in the same neighbourhood between the wars. Old Woman at Play (1978) turned to her own mother, Chaika, a dressmaker by training whose handmade dolls fill its photographs, and used them to ask where any making comes from. Wiseman taught English at Macdonald College and ran the writing programme at Banff, and died in Toronto in 1992.