God & Man

THE SACRIFICE (346 pp.) -- Adele Wiseman--Viking ($3.95).

Subtitled "a novel of fathers and sons," The Sacrifice takes its theme from the Bible, the talk of its old people from the folklore of Sholom Aleichem and the chat ter of its young from the Bronx locutions of Arthur Kober. Abraham is a patriarch in the classic mold--huge, fork-bearded, devout. When two of his sons are mur dered in a pogrom, he flees from the Ukraine to Canada. The tragedy briefly robs Abraham of his faith in God, turns his wife Sarah into a mindless zombie, and weighs down the frail shoulders of his remaining son, Isaac, with the necessity of making up for the loss of his talented brothers.

In the New World the only threat from the surrounding Gentiles is the occasional shouted taunt of "Dirdyjoo, dirdyjoo." Still, Abraham and his family retire into the same womblike, ghetto society from which they had fled. He works for Polsky, an earthy, ham-handed butcher, engages in subtle Talmudic debate about the ways of God and man, irritatedly suffers the attentions of Laiah, an opulently curved harlot, grows in peace and contentment as his son marries and makes him a grandfather. Then God tests Abraham once more, this time with the death of Isaac. Abraham breaks under the accusation that he destroyed his son in a sacrifice to his own ambition. Abraham's collapse is total and brings him to murder, the most abominable crime: "Who has to take a life stands alone on the edge of creation. Only God can understand him then.''

In this first novel, Canadian-born. 28-year-old Author Adele Wiseman, currently a social worker in Britain, grapples with darker mysteries -- of a man's relationship with his son, of his duty to and faith in his God -- than she has yet power to illuminate. For much of the book, Abraham strides forward with Old Testament credibility. But toward the novel's end, tragedy bows to contrivance which teeters on the brink of absurdity; the writing turns from archaic simplicity to perfervid pleading. Unfortunately for her purpose, the characters who seem most alive are the women : the silly, gabbling, pitiable gossip, Mrs. Plopler, and the bereft Sarah, who had wept so much that "the ocean had drained away, and she cried now with only the pebbles on the beach."

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