A Book for the Moment: On Helen Weinzweig’s ‘Basic Black with Pearls’

This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.

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In our current moment, a chorus of “nasty women” has flooded social media with grievances.

Unfortunately, these grievances recur with grim regularity. But even before modes of communication expanded and modernized, storytelling was the constant, the vehicle to voice oppression. Fiction has always been a means for coding muzzled, transgressive complaints.

Codes play both a literal and metaphoric role in Basic Black with Pearls, a brilliant midcentury novel by Canadian Helen Weinzweig. The book has just been reissued by New York Review Books, with an illuminating afterword by Sarah Weinman.

Born in 1915, Helen Weinzweig emigrated from Poland to Canada at age 9. She was raised in poverty by a single mother in Toronto. As a child she spent two. She never saw her father again.