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Helen Weinzweig
Helen Weinzweig
Born	Perla Chuma Tenenbaum; May 21, 1915; Zurich, Switzerland
Died	February 11, 2010; Toronto, Ontario
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]

Weinzweig also wrote and produced a one-act play, My Mother's Luck,^[3] and several of her short stories in A View from the Roof were adapted for stage and CBC Radio broadcast by playwright Dave Carley.^[3]

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)