Cressida Leyshon writes a remembrance of the novelist and short-story writer Lore Segal, who died at ninety-six, and contributed to The New Yorker for more than six decades.
In her preface to a reissued edition of the novel, Segal remembers being housed in a camp during a frigid English winter. “I did my first writing—I mean writing that understood itself to be writing—when I was ten years old,” she explains. “I sat in my coat and gloves and wrote a letter. It was a tearjerker, full of symbolisms—sunsets, dawns, and the rose in the snow outside the window, ‘a survivor,’ I wrote, ‘wearing a cap of snow askew on its bowed head.
Her work rarely has explicitly speculative elements, but here a symposium on genocide is interrupted by disembodied screams of pain—the sound of the victims of Dachau and Hiroshima. It’s a darkly comic exploration of the way that atrocities continue to haunt those who’ve suffered them, even if the sufferers can at times be insufferable. The Concordance Institute stories capture Segal’s fascination with how we inherit—or create—the connections that make up our social fabric.
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