How Lore Segal Saw the World in a Nutshell
Whether in novels or her long-running book group, the émigré author, who died this week at 96, was driven by empathy above all.
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out the window. Her world had been shrinking for some time, as a hip replacement, a pacemaker, deteriorating vision, and other encroachments of old age had made it difficult to leave her New York City apartment, even with the aid of the walker she referred to as “my chariot.” But now, after a minor heart attack in June, she was confined to a hospital bed at home. There, she could study the rooftops and antique water tanks of the Upper West Side—a parochial vision for some, but not for the Viennese-born Segal, who once described herself as “naturalized not in North America so much as in Manhattan.”
Of course, she was an old hand at seeing the universe in a nutshell. It was one of her great virtues as both a writer and a person, and her affinity for tiny, telling details had drawn me to her work long before I became her friend. I also loved her freshness of perception. In Segal’s 1985 novel, Her First American, Ilka Weissnix, newly arrived in this country, disembarks from a train in small-town Nevada and has what must be one of the very few epiphanies ever prompted by a glue factory. “The low building was made of a rosy, luminescent brick,” Segal writes, “and quivered in the blue haze of the oncoming night—it levitated. The classic windows and square white letters, saying AMERICAN GLUE INC. , moved Ilka with a sense of beauty so out of proportion to the object, Ilka recognized euphoria.”
