Helen Weinzweig

Helen Weinzweig
Born	Perla Chuma Tenenbaum May 21, 1915 Zurich, Switzerland
Died	February 11, 2010 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	novelist, short stories
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1960s-1980s
Notable works	Basic Black with Pearls, A View from the Roof
Spouse	John Weinzweig

Helen Weinzweig (1915–2010), née Tenenbaum, was a Canadian writer.[1] The author of two novels and a short story collection, her novel Basic Black with Pearls won the Toronto Book Award in 1981, and her short story collection A View from the Roof was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction in 1989.[1]

Born in Switzerland in 1915 to parents hailing from near Radom, Poland, she emigrated to Canada at age nine with her mother,[1] and married composer John Weinzweig on July 12, 1940.[2] She published her first short story, "Surprise!", in Canadian Forum in 1967,[1] and her debut novel Passing Ceremony was published in 1973.[1] She came to be regarded as one of Canada's first important feminist writers.[1] Her style was marked by experimental forms with some aspects of metafiction; in her short story "Journey to Porquis", a writer on a train trip realizes that all of his fellow passengers are characters in his novel.[1]

In the early 1980s, with the encouragement of director and producer Rina Fraticelli, the theatre artist Pol Pelletier adapted Weinzweig's short story My Mother’s Luck for the English language stage. Pelletier incarnated the Mother in productions in Montréal (at the Théâtre expérimental des femmes[3]), Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton.[4] Several of Weinzweig's short stories in A View from the Roof were later adapted for stage and CBC Radio broadcast by playwright Dave Carley.[5]

Weinzweig died in 2010, aged 94.[1]

Works

• Passing Ceremony (1973)
• Basic Black with Pearls (1981)
  • in German, transl. Brigitte Jakobeit: Schwarzes Kleid mit Perlen. Wagenbach, Berlin 2019
• My mother's luck (1983)
• A View from the Roof (1989)
• Nero e perle (1994)

Archive

Helen Weinzweig papers, Coll. 1945–2003 at the library, University of Toronto

External links

References

1. "Helen Weinzweig, Toronto author of surreal fiction, dead at age 94". The Globe and Mail, February 16, 2010.
2. John Beckwith; Brian Cherney. "A Self-Made Composer". Weinzweig Essays on His life and Music. p. 9.
3. "3e Festival de Créations de femmes". Espace GO. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
4. Lushington, Kate (1985). "The Possibility and the Habit". Fuse (Summer 1985): 62–63.
5. "Helen Weinzweig (1915 - 2010)". Playwrights Guild of Canada, April 1, 2010.