Find Request It
Cover Image

Basic black with pearls

"A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue. Shirley Kaszenbowski, nee Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls. She may seem ordinary enough, pricing silk sca...

Full description

Saved in:
Main Author: Weinzweig, Helen, 1915- (Author)
Other Authors: Weinman, Sarah (Contributor)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : New York Review Books, [2018]
Subjects:
Middle-aged women > Fiction.
Jews > Fiction.
Man-woman relationships > Fiction.
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Summary:"A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue. Shirley Kaszenbowski, nee Silverberg, is a middle-aged, middle-class woman in a Holt Renfrew tweed coat, a basic black dress, and a strand of real pearls. She may seem ordinary enough, pricing silk scarves at Eaton's or idling in hotel coffee shops, but in fact she is searching for her lover. He is an elusive figure, a man connected with "The Agency," a powerful technocrat who may or may not have suggested a rendezvous based on a secret code in the National Geographic. Her search takes her to the world of her past as a Jewish immigrant in the Spadina-Dundas area of Toronto. She finds the bakeries and rooming houses of her youth still haunted by survivors of postwar Europe and by her own memories of guilt and loss, while the consolations of art, opera, and pornography offer only echoes of her own illusions and desires. Her strange, wryly funny odyssey ends in a dramatic confrontation scene with her husband and "the other woman," as she trades in her basic black for another chance.In Basic Black with Pearls, Weinzweig displays her gift for creating sympathetic characters in a slightly surreal, but always recognizable world"--
Physical Description:156 pages ; 21 cm.
ISBN:9781681372167 (softcover : acid-free paper)
Author Notes:Helen Weinzweig (1915-2010) was born Helen Tenenbaum in Radom, Poland, and emigrated with her mother to Toronto when she was nine. As a teenager, she spent two years in an Ontario sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis; asked about the experience, she later recalled, "I read myself silly for two years." In 1940, Helen married the Canadian composer John Weinzweig and for the next three decades dedicated herself to promoting his career while raising their two sons and organizing and working at a cooperative nursery school in Toronto. In 1968, her first short story, "Surprise!," was published in Canadian Forum ; no story or novel she wrote was ever rejected by a publisher. Her first novel, Passing Ceremony , was published in 1973, followed by Basic Black with Pearls in 1980, which won the City of Toronto Book Award. A short-story collection, A View from the Roof (1989), was nominated for the Governor General's Award. A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, Weinzweig also wrote stage and radio plays and taught at writers' workshops in her later years.

Sarah Weinman is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense and the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World . Weinman's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine , The Washington Post , The New Republic , The Guardian , and other publications. She lives in New York City.

Similar Items