At Odds in the World

At Odds in the World: Essays on Jewish Canadian Women Writers brings together a series of essays by Ruth Panofsky that probe the articulation of Jewishness and femaleness through the lens of literature.

Showing how female Jewish identity is constructed in Canadian prose works that span the years 1956 to 2004, collectively the essays speak to the writers’ preoccupation with cultural identity and unearth a literary portrait of how it feels to be Jewish, Canadian, and female in a world, both new and old, that often is hostile and unaccommodating. Seven authors are represented here—Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman, Helen Weinzweig, Fredelle Bruser Maynard and her daughter Joyce Maynard, Nora Gold, and Lilian Nattel. Each writer seeks to investigate the intersecting complexities of her identity as a Canadian, a Jew, and a woman, as well as to critique prevailing notions of Canada as a country that embraces people of all faiths, of Judaism as open to female participation, and of Jewish women as submissive within marriage.