Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works ed. by Ruth Panofsky (review)

550 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 with >many people of all ages.= (ANN CAMERON) Ruth Panofsky, editor. Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works Guernica. 172. $10.00 In assembling this volume of essays on Adele Wiseman=s work, Ruth Panofsky was guided by one fundamental objective: breadth. In drawing together essays that analyse not only Wiseman=s two novels, The Sacrifice and Crackpot, but also her short fiction, her memoir devoted to her mother=s artistry, Old Woman at Play, her poetry, and her essays, Panofsky hoped to reflect the diversity of Wiseman=s oeuvre. By having those analytical essays represent a wide variety of critical approaches, Panofsky also hoped to see Wiseman=s breadth echoed in that of her critics. For the most part, Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works succeeds admirably in this objective. The task is not an easy one. There is a vital critical discussion of Wiseman in print, but much of it concentrates on the two novels and does not, as a whole, embody a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. However, Crackpot in particular, Wiseman=s dense, challenging and irreverent 1974 novel, has tended to inspire a good deal of energetic critical debate, particularly from a variety of feminist perspectives. Some of that debate emerges in the present volume of essays too. But Panofsky=s collection is noteworthy for the way it brings the other Adele Wisemans to our attention: Wiseman the increasingly subtle short story writer, Wiseman the complex memoirist, Wiseman the philosophical and yet down-to-earth essayist. In this regard, essays by Jon Kertzer on the ongoing tension between structural order and enigma in Old Woman at Play and by Donna Bennett on a similar tension between abstraction and the lived specifics of life in Wiseman=s essays are thought-provoking critical companion pieces, and Panofsky does well to place them side by side. The opening trio of essays by Donna Palmateer Pennee, Ruth Panofsky, and Francis Zichy also operate in tandem. Though these three essays have appeared elsewhere, they operate here together to greater advantage because of the critical debate they embody. Pennee and Panofsky engage a feminist perspective to talk about Wiseman=s fiction B a choice not surprising in itself. Their differences, however, are interesting. Pennee concludes her essay by emphasizing that, in her reading, Wiseman=s >emergent feminism, struggling with her orthodox inheritance, is operative in her first novel= (The Sacrifice). Panofsky, on the other hand, argues that Wiseman moves from >complicity with the patriarchy of orthodox Judaism in The Sacrifice= to >subversion of that culture= in Crackpot. Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot, therefore becomes a curiously reverent act of >atonement= for Laiah, the murdered prostitute in Wiseman=s first novel, a fascinating idea that is only heightened in its effect if one grants that Pennee humanities 551 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 is right to see more ideological conflict in The Sacrifice than Panofsky does. Zichy adds to this discussion in his essay on the Lurianic overtones of Crackpot because his reading of Hoda contrasts sharply with that of Panofsky and, implicitly, Pennee. >What price has Hoda paid for her survival if it has brought her here?= he asks. >Those boys she has screwed do not have any love for her, no matter how she might rationalize it, and her cooperation with them only makes her an object of mockery and contempt in the community.= Compare Panofsky, in a strikingly different passage, in which she argues that Hoda is, on the contrary, accepted by her community in a way that Laiah, in The Sacrifice, never was: >Hoda serves the therapeutic and sexual needs of her customers, many of whom regard her as their friend. Hoda refuses to be excluded and participates as a secular member of the Jewish community.= The character of Hoda, Wiseman=s life-affirming, comically generous prostitute, has proved a conundrum for Wiseman critics, and clearly the debate over her continues. The key here, too, one suspects is that characteristic Wiseman stance: tension. It is this tension that Panofsky=s Adele Wiseman: Essays on Her Works offers readers...