Postscript: Lore Segal 1928 - 2024

Lore Segal (Photo by Ellen Dubin) 

I see in the Times that Lore Segal has died. She wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker memory pieces – “Spry for Frying” (April 18, 2011; included in her The Journal I Did Not Keep, 2019). It’s only three pages long, but it’s unforgettable. Perhaps its brevity contributes to its indelibility. It’s a recollection of Segal’s arrival in America, when she was twenty-three. It’s an attempt to remember. Not everything is clear. Segal begins, 

In memories of journeys past, some portions remain stubbornly unavailable to recollection. I can call up no mental picture of my mother and me boarding the plane in Santo Domingo—in those days it was called Ciudad Trujillo—nor do I remember arriving in New York. (I’ve always intended to Google the airport at which we must have landed. This was May 1, 1951.) And then did we take the bus, the subway, a taxi? Did Paul, my uncle, come to pick us up?

One thing she does recall is the “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” sign “blinking on and off from the New Jersey shore.” She writes,

While my mother, on that first evening in New York, stayed in the apartment with my grandmother, Paul walked me the one block to Riverside Drive. The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple. “This would be prettier than the Thames Embankment if it weren’t all so commercial,” I pronounced. At twenty-three, I had many opinions, and that America was commercial was one I had imbibed in England. It was to England that I had longed, during the drag of the years in the Dominican Republic, to return.

That “The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple” is wonderful. Segal’s memory coalesces around the sign. Then one day the sign disappears. She says,

There must have been a particular day when I looked across the Hudson and there was no “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” in the New Jersey sky. I felt surprised, and deprived. True, I hadn’t seen the brand name on any product—hadn’t looked for or missed it in the supermarket. (Google “Spry.” When had it changed its name, merged with another brand, gone belly up?) Again and yet again, and still I look across the Hudson River, surprised, by now, that I am surprised at the naked sky and unable to complete the picture in my mind: Was the second element “Spry for Cooking” or was it “Spry for Baking”? Do I remember correctly that it blinked?

The sign becomes a symbol of life’s transience. The piece ends poignantly:

The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone. 

That last line is inspired! Segal embraces her own ephemerality.