At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers (review)

Ruth Panofsky is a poet and professor of literature in Toronto. Her scholarly work has centered on several Canadian women authors, not all of them Jewish; her poetry mines families and immigration stories within a recognizably Canadian framework. She is perfectly placed to write the first book about Jewish Canadian women writers. As she points out in the introduction to this interesting book, there is no Canadian tradition of Jewish literary criticism similar to that which created a mid-century Jewish canon in the United States (one that, at any rate, was primarily male). Thus, the Jewish Canadian woman writer labors under a double cloak of invisibility. Panofsky addresses this lack of critical apparatus with a look at the prose writings of seven authors, most of whom are not well known even in Canada. This anti-canon is at times exhilarating: The writers Panofsky investigates are not bound by conventions of writing, of Judaism or of Canadian life.

The best-known author under discussion is Adele Wiseman, whose 1974 novel Crackpot (now back in print after being unavailable for a number of years) is a Canadian classic. Investigating her use of the figure of the Jewish whore, Panofsky analyzes Crackpot as a reimagining and critique of Wiseman's earlier novel The Sacrifice in ways that allow for Jewish women to be alive and active participants in creating Jewish community: "Hoda is neither silenced nor destined to the solitary life of an aging prostitute; rather, she is allowed personal fulfillment, a subversive achievement for women, to say nothing of prostitutes, within Judaism" (p. 81).

Miriam Waddington, best known as a poet, is represented here by her single short-story collection, Summer at Lonely Beach and Other Stories—which, it must be said, does not represent her best work. Unlike her subtle and mysterious poems, these stories can sound didactic and somewhat moralizing in tone, setting up mixed marriage as an inevitable downward slide and Israel as the only location for Jewish rebirth. Yet Panofsky pulls out some threads in these stories which make them seem more complicated than that: "Many of Waddington's protagonists are girls and women whose narrative journeys lead to painful revelations they do not fully comprehend" (p. 19); the "narratives move outward, eschewing resolution in favor of openness" (p. 31).

These two authors are the only ones in the book about whom there is already a significant body of scholarly material (much of it by Panofsky herself). An author like Helen Weinzweig, who made a bit of a splash with her novel Basic Black with Pearls but has somehow failed to gain a large reading audience, is ripe for critical inquiry. Weinzweig is a fascinating figure, because she didn't begin to write until middle age, and when she did, it was in an elliptical and experimental style that owes as much to avant garde music and art as it does to literature. The thrust of almost all her stories is "her belief in the paradox that tragedy always lurks beneath the comfortable and conventional surface of everyday life" (p. 50). Weinzweig also has a very small oeuvre: Since 1973, she has published three books and has had several plays produced; now in her 90s, she has, according to Panofsky, been at work on another novel for almost twenty years. Panofsky includes in her book both an interview with Weinzweig and a critical essay about her. This is a wise move, as Weinzweig's voice is so distinctive and forceful that the reader is forced to put aside any preconceptions, stereotypes or assumptions and accept her on her own terms. She comes across as surpassingly confident in the artistic soundness of her work and methods: "Basic Black reflects my desire to belong to the bourgeois, nuclear family. The inherent conflict was to want it and to despise it. I did not write the novel to satisfy readers' expectations" (p. 39).

Other writers whose work is covered here are short-story...