WEINZWEIG, HELEN

WEINZWEIG, HELEN (Tenenbaum; 1915– ), Canadian author. Weinzweig was born in Poland and immigrated to Canada at the age of nine with her divorced mother. She did not know her father until she was an adult. Weinzweig grew up in the Jewish immigrant district of Toronto and deliberately abandoned her native Polish and Yiddish languages. In Toronto, she attended school for the first time. Her mother remained a single parent and was sole provider at a time when women rarely found themselves in such circumstances. Weinzweig's story "My Mother's Luck," included in her short story collection and adapted as a one-act play, records the difficult life and dynamic character of her mother. During adolescence, Weinzweig spent two years at a sanatorium while recuperating from tuberculosis. It was during this period that she developed the love of reading that continued throughout her life. After completing high school, Weinzweig was forced by the Depression to work successively as a stenographer, receptionist, and salesperson. She married the composer john weinzweig in 1940 and they had two sons. Weinzweig's first novel, Passing Ceremony (1973), published when she was 58, is highly experimental in form and presents a somber, ironic picture of the ritual of marriage, the "passing ceremony" of its title. As an expressionistic work, Passing Ceremony employs strategies from other genres – film, painting, and music – to bring meaning and unity to an otherwise senseless marriage between a homosexual and a promiscuous woman. Weinzweig's narrative style blends the surreal and the gothic and communicates her belief in the paradox that tragedy always lurks beneath the comfortable and conventional surface of everyday life. Basic Black with Pearls (1980), Weinzweig's second novel and winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, is an ingenious work of puzzles that also exposes the vacuousness of traditional marriage. Written as a highly subjective interior monologue, its protagonist is the respectable Shirley Kaszenbowski, née Silverberg, alias Lola Montez, a middle-class, middle-aged, married woman in a basic black dress and pearls who travels the world to meet her elusive lover, Coenraad, an alleged spy for an unidentified "Agency." Shirley's chameleon-like transformations imply that all behavior is mere acting, and Weinzweig's innovative use of the mask motif heightens the interplay of reality and illusion that is at the heart of this novel. A View from the Roof (1989) is a collection of thirteen short stories whose range of themes and styles evoke Weinzweig's novels. The short story "The Sea at Bar" appeared in the journal Parchment (vol. 2, 1993–94). (Ruth Panofsky (2nd ed.)