Education
University of Manitoba.
( Hoda is a prostitute, but that is not the most importan...)
Hoda is a prostitute, but that is not the most important fact about her. Earthy, bawdy, vulnerable, and big-hearted, she is the daughter of an impoverished Jewish couple who emigrated from Russia to Canada to escape persecution. Growing up in a ghetto of Winnipeg, she experiences cruelty and bigotry early and fights back with humor and anger, which is something to behold as her young body takes on gargantuan proportions. In the neighborhood, she is considered a crackpot and worse. In truth, she is a cracked pot, a flawed human being, but her quest for love, which brings hope out of humiliation, is one of the most memorable in modern fiction. Crackpot, set in the period between two world wars, is Adele Wiseman's comic vision, for all its darkness. Somewhat satirically, the novel touches on puritanical hypocrisy and the inhumanity of institutions, notably the schools and the welfare system. Hoda, caught in a web of relationships beginning with her blind father and humpbacked mother, is its great heartbeat.
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University of Manitoba.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1949. Her parents were Russian Jews who emigrated from the Ukraine to Canada, in part, to escape the pogroms that accompanied the Russian Civil War. Her only other novel, Crackpot, was published in 1974.
Both novels deal with Jewish immigrant heritage, the struggle to survive the Depression and World World War II, and the challenges the next generation faced in acculturating to Canadian society.
Wiseman also published plays, children"s stories, essays, and other non-fiction. Her book, Old Woman at Play, examines and meditates on the creative process while paying tribute to Wiseman"s mother and the dolls she made.
She was an active and accessible Writer-in-Residence at the University of Windsor in her final years. At a campus rally against the First Gulf War, she read passionately a new poem denouncing war.
( Hoda is a prostitute, but that is not the most importan...)