Living with Books
HICKS, CRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Sacrifice,' by Adele Wiseman, A Good Novel About Jews in Canada WHEN a literary journalist comes upon a good novel, his first obligation is to say so....
...Just as the names constantly echo Old Testament stories, so the events are assimilated to a 4,000-year history...
...Indeed, he sacrifices his life, for the strain put upon an already weakened heart leads to his death after a year of invalidism...
...Although The Sacrifice obviously draws upon materials that are close to her, this cannot be in any literal sense her story...
...Afterward he can try to explain why it is good and, if he sees fit, why it is not so good as it conceivably might be...
...Abraham, meanwhile, has made a life for himself, in the butcher shop that employs him, in the synagogue and among his Jewish friends, and especially in his dreams for his son and, later, his grandson...
...Isaac has come to question many of the beliefs that are precious to his father, but, to Abraham's infinite delight, he risks his life to save the Torah from a burning synagogue...
...This last has a blood-chilling fascination, but I was even more deeply moved by the quarrel, in which two admirable persons, driven by forces too great for them to resist, seek to destroy one another...
...Miss Wiseman's most impressive achievement is her evocation of the rich cultural heritage of the Jews...
...Her power is revealed in a number of quite magnificent scenes: the lynching of Moses and Jacob as recounted by Abraham, the rescue of the Torah, the quarrel between Abraham and Ruth, and the murder of Laiah...
...The reader realizes at once that they are under a shadow, but it is some time before he learns that the older sons, Moses and Jacob, were killed in a pogrom in the Ukraine...
...The novel tells the story of three generations of Jewish immigrants to Canada, beginning with the impulsive flight of Abraham, Sarah and their son Isaac from the train in which they are crossing the continent...
...The skill can be seen in her handling of the passage of time-always a problem for the beginning novelist who chooses a large canvas...
...For the mother this is a fatal blow, though some years pass before she dies...
...Not every Jew is an Abraham, not even every Jew fresh from the Old World, as the book clearly shows, but Abraham, in every fiber of his being, is always a Jew...
...These are important matters, but they are not so important as that an act of creation has taken place...
...She occasionally falters, but she has gone about her job in the right way, and in the main she is successful...
...Isaac, Ruth, and later Moses are confronted, as so many other people have been at one stage or another of their history, by a terrible paradox: The truth Abraham has so magnificently lived by is to them no truth at all...
...Here and elsewhere Abraham is a commanding figure...
...It is the central irony of the book that Abraham himself, by coming to the New World, has set in motion the forces that must destroy the way of life of which he is a splendid product...
...Miss Wiseman has both skill and power...
...It then remains for Miss Wiseman to show the effect of Abraham's act on the Jewish community and especially on his grandson...
...The center of his affections is naturally his grandson, Moses, and this leads to conflict -and, eventually, to a heart-rending quarrel-with Ruth, Moses's mother...
...Actually not many first novels these days are like that, and certainly Miss Wiseman's isn't...
...The materials have been worked over in her imagination and transmuted, and she has sought diligently for ways of making the most of them...
...We know that they are right in their conflict with the old man, but our sympathies are with him, and so, to their credit, are theirs-even, in the end, Moses's...
...Isaac has grown up in these years, and, in view of the family's poverty, has gone to work in a factory...
...Out of this quarrel grows the fierce deed that is the climax of the novel...
...The notion prevails that a first novel must be the outpouring of a young writer's heart and soul, an uncontrolled gush of naive astonishment...
...Abraham is always and everywhere a Jew, and that is the essence of his greatness...
...Throughout the book, indeed, Abraham is dominant, and it is perhaps a significant flaw that the other characters, and particularly Isaac, seem dim in comparison with him...
...The Sacrifice (Viking, $3.95), a first novel by a 28-year-old Canadian, Adele Wiseman, is a book to which I am happy to call attention...
...He has met and married Ruth, a girl who shares his growing skepticism and yet is devoted to his father and mother, and she has borne him a son, Moses...
...Even now, after this terrible loss, Abraham manages to face life with confidence...
...I felt the same quality in Sam Astrachan's An End to Dying, but there the past was portrayed in terms of richly endowed individuals, whereas here tradition itself is central...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 38
