A beautiful and complex - and short - story by Lore Segal

Lore Segal is a writer I hadn't heard about in many years and was pleasantly surprised to see her story, Dandelion, in the current New Yorker; I remember when her novel Her First American came out in the 1980s to positive reviews - wanted to read it, should've read it, maybe will read it. In any event, she seemed to vanish into obscurity after that book. A brief look at her info online shows that she across her career has had many teaching gigs and has gone a long time between publications and now - this is why the NYer is on board - is coming out with a final collection of stories - at age 91! These stories probably cover the past 25 yeas or so of her writing. Dandelion is a complex and compact and powerful story. She begins by noting that, like Henry James (I didn't know this) she is revisiting and revising stories from earlier in her career. In this one she is retelling an event from about 1938 (when she was about 10) that she wrote in about 1948 and now looks back on, and her first thought is that her writing in her 20s was florid and overly descriptive and full of fake metaphors and similes that drew too much attention to style and drew readers away from the substance. Pretty harsh! - but she gives some examples and she's right (though he work was probably typical of the era in many ways). So she proceeds - telling the story in a crisp, "modern" manner. The narrative itself involves her as a young girl enjoying a sun-filled morning in the Austria Alps and hoping to preserve this moment forever (which she does, in art); then she sets off w/ her father on a hike to an Alpine meadow. All goes well, but at the meadow the encounter a large group of teenagers; her father engages one young man in conversation, but it's obvious (to the narrator) that the boy does not want to hear her father's rambling anecdote - and that his friends are laughing it her father. What could be worse for a child - her father embarrassing her in front of other children? Simple - but on the broader level we recognize a few things: these teenagers are the foreshadowing of the Hitler youth who will do far more than embarrass her father pretty soon. The climb up the mountain, which totally exhausts the narrator, is a figurative journey for the author, into the difficulties of her life and her youth. We know that the author herself fled German in 1938, lived as an orphan in England, learned the language and the culture; we know her parents joined her during the war and her father died right after the war. So we see that he brief prayer to preserve a day of sunshine was not answered at all - that day from youth was an even long gone, a time she should look back on w/ nostalgia but does so only with pain and shame: She should have "prayed" to preserve and cherish a beautiful memory of her father, not this awkwardness and misplacement. Overall, we get in this story at least 4 levels of time: the present (90-year-old writer) looking back, the life story (father dead in the 1940s), the composition of this story in its original version, and the events themselves.