Helen Weinzweig

{{Short description|Canadian writer (1915–2010)}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Helen Weinzweig

| birth_name = Perla Chuma Tenenbaum

| image =

| birth_date = May 21, 1915

| birth_place = Zurich, Switzerland

| death_date = February 11, 2010

| death_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada

| occupation = novelist, short stories

| period = 1960s-1980s

| nationality = Canadian

| notableworks = Basic Black with Pearls, A View from the Roof

| spouse = John Weinzweig

| website =

}}

Helen Weinzweig (1915–2010), née Tenenbaum, was a Canadian writer.[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/helen-weinzweig-toronto-author-of-surreal-fiction-dead-at-age-94/article1208661/ "Helen Weinzweig, Toronto author of surreal fiction, dead at age 94"]. The Globe and Mail, February 16, 2010. 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.{{cite book

| chapter=A Self-Made Composer

| author1=John Beckwith | author2=Brian Cherney

| title=Weinzweig Essays on His life and Music | page=9

}} 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.

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{{Cite web |title=3e Festival de Créations de femmes |url=https://espacego.com/les-spectacles/1983-1984/3e-festival-de-creations-de-femmes/ |access-date=October 8, 2024 |website=Espace GO}}), Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton.{{Cite journal |last=Lushington |first=Kate |date=1985 |title=The Possibility and the Habit |journal=Fuse |issue=Summer 1985 |pages=62–63}} 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.[https://www.playwrightsguild.ca/news/helen-weinzweig-1915-2010 "Helen Weinzweig (1915 - 2010)"]. Playwrights Guild of Canada, April 1, 2010.

Weinzweig died in 2010, aged 94.