num_pages: 144
description: A lost feminist classic  and winner of the Toronto Book Award  reissued to coincide with the 35th anniversary of publication. In her yearning elusive search for a lover Shirley Kaszenbowski sheds her drab basic black existence together with torturous memories of guilt and loss as a Jewish immigrant in Toronto. Shirley Kaszenbowski ne 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 Eatons 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.
language: English
title: Basic Black with Pearls
publisher: A List