Helen Weinzweig

Helen Weinzweig (1915–2010), née Tenenbaum, was a Canadian writer. 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.

Born in Switzerland in 1915 to parents hailing from near Radom, Poland, she emigrated to Canada at age nine with her mother, and married composer John Weinzweig on July 12, 1940. She published her first short story, "Surprise!", in Canadian Forum in 1967, and her debut novel Passing Ceremony was published in 1973. She came to be regarded as one of Canada's first important feminist writers. 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.

Weinzweig also wrote and produced a one-act play, My Mother's Luck, and several of her short stories in A View from the Roof were adapted for stage and CBC Radio broadcast by playwright Dave Carley.

Weinzweig died in 2010, aged 94.

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