Adele Wiseman, the daughter of Pesach (Peter) and Chaika (Clara) Rosenberg Waisman, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on 21 May 1928. The third of four living children, Wiseman had an older sister, Marjm, an older brother, Harry, and a younger brother, Morris. A foster brother, Georg Feher, a Hungarian refugee, joined the family after World War II. The times and her particular ethnicity shaped the writer who has become one of Canada's most sensitive delineators of the immigrant experience. Wiseman's Jewish consciousness was fed by the rich sense of biblical stories and shtetl lore from the European past that infused her home in North Winnipeg's immigrant neighborhood. Growing up during the Depression and during the war years, sensitive to the hardships of all Canadians but particularly of those new to the land, Wiseman learned firsthand the realities of Jewish persecution. "From early childhood," she wrote in Memoirs of a Book...