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Lore Vailer Segal (née Groszmann; March 8, 1928 – October 7, 2024) was an Austrian-American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer, and author of children's books. She was the author of five novels, and was known for her autobiographical fiction, drawing on her life as an Austrian Jewish refugee who Kindertransport, growing up in England before settling in the United States. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare's Kitchen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Groszmann's father found himself jobless and threatened. He listed the family on the American immigration quota, and in December that year Lore Segal joined other Jewish children on the first wave of the Kindertransport rescue mission, seeking safety in England.
While with her English foster parents, she found a purple notebook and started writing, filling its 36 pages with German prose. It was the beginning of a novel she would eventually write in English, Other People's Houses.
On her eleventh birthday, her parents arrived in England on a domestic servants visa. Despite his refugee status, Ignatz Groszmann was labeled a German-speaking alien and interned on the Isle of Man, where he suffered a series of strokes. He died a few days before the war ended. Lore Groszmann and her mother then moved to London, where she attended the Bedford College for Women at the University of London on a scholarship. She graduated in 1948 with an honours degree in English literature.
In 1951, after spending three years in the Dominican Republic with her mother, waiting for their US entry permit to arrive, they moved to Washington Heights, New York City, where they shared a two-room apartment with her grandmother and uncle.
In 1961, she married David Segal, an editor at Knopf.
Segal published her first novel, Other People's Houses, in 1964 to widespread acclaim. Collecting her refugee stories from The New Yorker and writing a few more, Segal fictionalized her experience growing up in different households in England.
In 1985, Segal's third novel Her First American was published, which The New York Times praised, saying, "Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel." It tells the story of Ilka Weissnix, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, and her relationship with Carter Bayoux, a middle-aged black intellectual, "her first American". Segal based the character of Carter Bayoux on her friend Horace R. Cayton Jr., with whom she had been in a relationship for five years. She received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for the novel.
Shakespeare's Kitchen, published in 2007, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Thirteen stories make up the novel, set in a liberal college in Connecticut think tank. Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. The novel was republished in slightly revised form in 2024 in the UK as ‘An Absence of Cousins’.
A fifth novel, Half the Kingdom, was published by Melville House in October 2013.
Regarding her work, Segal said, "I want to write about the stuff – in the midst of all the stew of being a human being – that is permanent, where Adam and Eve and I would have had the same experiences. I really am less interested in the social change." Her novels often deal with the process of assimilation, from a refugee arriving in a new country which must become her home (as in Her First American), to a flighty poet finding her footing in a constantly moving literary world (as in Lucinella).
Segal continued to write until the end of her life, authoring short stories in The New Yorker. The theme of many of these, written in her 90s, was ‘Ladies’ Lunch’, in which a group of elderly women in Manhattan meet up to puzzle, and laugh at, the enigmas and affronts of ageing. These were collected and published as a novella in 2023, as ‘Ladies Lunch’. In the title story, one of their number is placed unhappily in a home and the others conspire to spring her. Segal had a late flowering of success for the volume and continued writing ‘Ladies Lunch’ stories up until her last days. The final one, authored by dictation as her health declined, was published by the New Yorker a week before her death. She had been writing continuously for the magazine since 1960.
Segal and her mother, Franzi Groszmann, appeared in the films My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports (1996), directed by Melissa Hacker, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination, and , directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and produced by Deborah Oppenheimer, which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2001. Segal's mother was the last survivor of the parents who placed their children in the Kindertransport program. Franzi died in 2005, one hundred years old.
Segal lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She entered palliative care at her home after an apparent heart attack in June 2024, and died there from heart failure on October 7, 2024, at the age of 96.
Career
Between 1968 and 1996, Segal taught writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Princeton, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University, from which she retired in 1996. She later taught at 92 Y.
Personal life and death
Segal and her husband, David, were married for nine years, until his death from a heart attack in 1970, aged 42. They had two children.
Work
Novels
Translations
(1973). 9780374180577, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374180577 Two volumes.
Children's books
Awards
External links
Categories: 1928 Births, 2024 Deaths, 20th-century American Novelists, 20th-century American Short Story Writers, 20th-century American Translators, 20th-century American Women Novelists, 21st-century American Jews, 21st-century American Novelists, 21st-century American Short Story Writers, 21st-century American Translators, 21st-century American Women Novelists, Alumni Of Bedford College, London, American Children's Writers, American People Of Austrian-jewish Descent, American Women Academics, American Women Children's Writers, American Women Short Story Writers, Austrian Emigrants To The United States, Bennington College Faculty, Columbia University Faculty, Deaths From Congestive Heart Failure In New York, Jewish American Novelists, Kindertransport Refugees, Novelists From New Jersey, Novelists From New York City, Novelists From Ohio, Novelists From Vermont, Ohio State University Faculty, People From The Upper West Side, Princeton University Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Faculty, The New Yorker People, Writers From Manhattan
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