Helen Weinzweig, an award-winning Toronto author who only began writing well into her forties, died last week at the age of 94.
Weinzweig was the wife of John Weinzweig, the famed Canadian composer, but she came into her own with the 1980 publication of her second novel, Basic Black with Pearls (Anansi), which won the Toronto Book Award in 1981.
In 1989, she was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award for fiction for A View from the Roof, a collection of 13 short stories written over 21 years that was published by Goose Lane Editions.
Her first published story, Surprise!, appeared in Canadian Forum in 1967, when she was 52. She immediately caught the attention of the book world with a highly literary and often surreal style that was inspired by writers such as Ionesco, Barthes and Beckett.
In Journey To Porquis, a story typical of her vision, a writer boards a train only to find that the train doesn't stop where he’d planned to disembark, and all the people on board are characters in his novel.
And in Passing Ceremony (Anansi, 1973), her first and only other novel, the action takes place at a wedding between a homosexual and a promiscuous woman and is told via the internal monologues of the guests in attendance.
Weinzweig’s books and stories were embraced in the 1960s and ‘70s by feminists, who saw in them a depiction of women that was missing from the literature of the day. “Passing Ceremony and Basic Black with Pearls were important books at their time of publication, because they were experimental in form, and they remain important because they speak to the experiences of women at a very specific point in time,” said Marc Cote, the publisher of Cormorant Books. “These were two novels that for many years were the mainstay of women's studies and Canadian literature classes.”
In 1996, a stage version of A View from the Roof written by playwright Dave Carley debuted in a Toronto theatre to positive reviews.
Weinzweig was born Tenenbaum in Poland in 1915 into an orthodox Jewish household. Her parents’ marriage was a tempestuous affair that ended in divorce, and she moved at age 9 to Toronto with her mother. When she arrived in Canada, she had never been formally schooled and couldn’t speak a word of English, but she was an avid learner and reader and soon caught up with children her age.
All the literary forms were men's, all the philosophies were men's philosophies. ... I had to translate these forms into the female
She met her husband at a Toronto high school, but they didn’t begin their courtship until after she had spent two years in a rural Ontario sanatorium, fighting, and nearly dying from, tuberculosis. The disease left her with one collapsed lung and the other partially damaged, but it also gave her the chance to spend two years doing the thing she loved most in life: reading. “I read myself silly for two years,” she told The Globe and Mail in an 1990 interview.
She read the works of her fellow Pole Joseph Conrad, the surreal literature of Barthes and Beckett, and books by Auden, Kerouac, Sartre and more. She also began a process that would inform her work as a female writer: “One of the things I had to learn after reading all this male fiction was, what do I as a woman feel like. ... All the literary forms were men's, all the philosophies were men's philosophies. ... I had to translate these forms into the female.”
