Talk:Rudy Wiebe

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Biographical details[edit]

Wiebe included an interview in the end of his 2011 book River of Stone, where he denies being born in Saskatchewan, and denies being of a Mennonite background. He said he was born near Edmonton, and his father was the estranged son of a senior British general. Geo Swan (talk) 21:40, 5 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Geo Swan: First, that book is 1995. Second, that book's subtitle is Fictions and Memories. In his 2007 memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, he states that he was born in the Speedwell-Jackpine district of Saskatchewan, near Fairholme, to a Mennonite family. Multiple reliable sources support the claim:

not the least of this is his publisher's biography that appears in many reviews of his works. I believe the quote you provided is one of his fictions. Walter Görlitz (talk) 17:04, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. I'd never heard of Wiebe, until I came across him, while working on Lazarus Sittichinli.

Thanks for your links, which seem to establish his 1995 interview was a joke or a hoax.

So, what if any coverage does this alternate account merit in the article?

How much of the interview did you read? Writing as someone from an upper-crust UK background, he asserts that he made a terrible choice to pretend to be a Mennonite - that other ethnic groups would have been far better choices, and the best choice would have been to claim to be Jewish. Read the faux interview, and compare his reasoning with this passage from a 1978 article in Macleans:

The world fails to grasp the significance. Wiebe recalls a publisher flying him, first class, to New York to tell him that if he wrote as well about Jews as he did about Mennonites, he’d be a best seller. His New York agent regularly forwards rejection, slips from American publishers who agree Wiebe writes marvelously, but his topics are too Canadian. But neither do Canadians feel a kinship. Mennonites don’t read fiction; non-Mennonites don’t understand their dialect.

Did RS write about the faux interview?

How many of the details he offered in the faux interview weren't made up? Did the general he claimed was his grandfather really exist? Geo Swan (talk) 18:13, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not an authority on Weibe, but there were a few items that helped me to detect it was a fiction. Didn't read much more than the sentences around what was highlighted. Walter Görlitz (talk) 18:48, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

While following up on your suggestion I learned a few things.

The branches of German known as Low German are dying out. Yiddish and the dialect of Low German spoken by Mennonites are not that far apart. I didn't know that. There used to be a very active Yiddish Theater - plays written and performed in Yiddish. Yiddish speakers used to publish works in Yiddish. Traditional Klezmer music was sung in Yiddish. That is all fading. And apparently those wanting to preserve a tradition of literary works in the Mennonite's dialect see themselves facing the same problem.

I think it makes his comments on what his career would have been like if he was jewish, not mennonite, worth looking for more RS. Geo Swan (talk) 20:03, 9 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]