Bonnie Bluh

Bonnie Bluh (March 29, 1926 – October 2, 2008), born Helen Celia Bluh was a Jewish-American feminist novelist and essayist.

Biography Helen Celia Bluh was born March 29, 1926, in New York City, to Morris Bluh and Mary Steinberg.

Bluh, as friends and family knew her, was brought up in Sunnyside, Queens, a neighborhood that has repeatedly appeared in her novels.

Bluh made her first appearance as a singer at the age of three on the Hearns Radio Children's Hour. As she always liked to recount, she wrote her first play when she was 7 years old and set it in Africa, writing all the dialogue in a made-up language. It was staged at P.S. 150, the first New York progressive school she was attending and starred her fellow students.

Bluh had finished her untitled memoir just before her death. It is a book about the approach of death; her death. It was a comical late-in-life Bildungsroman including versions of her own obituary. Karen Lindsey in the Boston Herald American wrote, "By its warm, personal and probing nature, Woman to Woman does much to reaffirm the existence of an international sisterhood of women."

Banana (Macmillan, 1976, )

Bluh's first novel, Banana, was well received and was reissued in 2000 by iUniverse under the auspices of the Authors Guild. The novel relates the story of Joanna, a woman who could have done anything, but married Jay, became a homemaker, and in her mid-forties realized she wanted something more. A critic for Publishers Weekly wrote, "You bleed for Joanna, but most of all you believe in her. This is a novel with a raised consciousness, a mature, intelligent novel of real talent and excitement Doubting Thomases have claimed the feminist movement has yet to produce. Bonnie Bluh, herself an actress-playwright-singer-dancer, has done it." Lynda Schor added in Ms. Magazine that "What makes Banana exceptional and fascinating is its inventiveness, its verve, originality, its sometimes sheer madness, its rage. Preposterousness and eccentricity woven into the mundane. The result is as colorful and variegated as a Peruvian scarf... the most scintillating dialogue I've come across in a long time." In her review in the San Francisco Chronicle Elizabeth Pomada added that the novel's "high velocity monologue is raucous, dirty-truthful, and chortlingly funny." Budicki for the Voice News wrote, "A 'torrent of consciousness' sweeping before it all the modern jargon and confused issues of today... includes a cast of sixteen people. This reviewer groaned when she saw them listed on the jacket, but couldn't lay the book down after starting, having practically to prop her eyes open with fingers, to finish reading at three a.m."

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