Lore Segal, Wry Chronicler of Survivor & Refugee Life

By | On December 17, 2024 | Updated December 19, 2024 | Comments (0)

Lore Segal (March 8, 1928 – October 7, 2024) chronicled her experiences as a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant in search of a home who eventually found her way to the United States. Her fiction was oddly humorous and yet deeply insightful.

Poet Carolyn Kizer, writing about Segal’s 1985 novel Her First American in the New York Times Book Review, said Segal came “closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel,” even though, Kizer noted with a touch of irony, its main characters were Black people and Jewish refugees and it was not written by a man.


The Kindertransport

Born Lore Valier Groszmann in Vienna, the only child of a bank accountant and a homemaker, she was one of the first children to leave Nazi-occupied Europe on the Kindertransport trains that carried thousands of Jewish children to foster families and shelters in Britain.

While it is easy to romanticize this humanitarian effort, it’s important to remember that the British were willing to take Jewish children, but not adults, and that the rescued children were not necessarily accepted with loving arms.

Lore chronicled her experiences as a young refugee in her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Other People’s Houses, published in 1964. The novel portrays the experiences of “Lorle Groszmann.” It draws on her experiences of over ten years of being shuffled from one household to another and then from one country to another, eventually with her mother.

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Lore Segal in 1939, around the age of 11

Lore in 1939, around the age of 11
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The novel is saved from the maudlin by the narrator’s wise and unapologetic sense of self. Surrounded by crying parents and children, Lorle is curious about the journey she is about to undertake and eager to add to the list of countries she has visited. In the Netherlands, awaiting the ship that will carry her and other children in the transport to England, she wonders whether she can legitimately add that nation to her list—it is nighttime, and she cannot see anything.

During her first cold winter in England, in 1938, ten-year-old Lore wrote what she later described as a “tearjerker” letter to the refugee committee in England. It won her parents a visa to leave Austria. There, however, they were treated as enemy aliens—her father detained on the Isle of Man, and Lore and her mother restricted as to where in England they were allowed to live. Her father, eventually released from his internment and barred from working in any occupation except that of a butler, died shortly before the end of the war.

 

Arriving in the United States

Lore graduated from Bedford College, a women’s college at the University of London, in 1948. Then she went to the Dominican Republic, one of the few nations that would accept Jewish immigrants, to join other relatives. In 1951, Lore was finally allowed to enter the United States along with her mother, grandmother, and an uncle. They all lived in one apartment on 157th  Street in Manhattan’s Washington Heights.

She married David Segal in 1961. An editor at Harper & Row and at Knopf, he died of a heart attack in 1970 at the age of forty. Social security and financial support from her late husband’s family allowed Lore to raise their two young children with the help of her mother.

Lore and her husband had moved into a rent-controlled apartment on 100th Street; shortly before David’s death, Lore’s mother Franzi had rented another apartment in the same building.

 

Finding Her Subject

Lore knew she was a writer since the age of twelve. Sick in bed as her mother read aloud to her from Charles Dickens, she later said, “the concept writer burst upon me. This is what I was going to do. It did not occur to me that I’d been doing it since I was ten.”

But before she could make money as a writer, Lore worked at a variety of jobs, including secretary and textile designer. She also took a course in creative writing at the New School in New York City.

At first, she said, she “couldn’t think of anything to write about. The Holocaust experience, it seemed to me, was already public knowledge … It was at a party that somebody asked me a question to which my answer was an account of the children’s transport that had brought me to England. It was my first experience of the silence of a roomful of people listening. I listened to the silence. I understood that I had a story to tell.”

In 1976, Lore published her second book, a novella titled Lucinella. Stanley Elkin praised this cult classic about a poet who is visited by Zeus as “shamelessly wonderful.” She also wrote children’s books, including Tell Me a Mitzi (1970), a tribute to her mother’s role in rearing her own children, and The Juniper Tree (1973), illustrated by her friend Maurice Sendak. She also taught — at Columbia, Princeton, and Bennington, for a while commuting between New York and Chicago to teach at the University of Illinois.

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Her First American by Lore Segal

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Her First American

Her First American was published in 1985. Ilka Weissnix, a recently arrived Jewish refugee, takes a train journey to the western United States to “look for America” in 1951. While traveling, she meets Carter Bayoux, a prominent Black intellectual and tragically alcoholic charmer who eventually becomes her lover.

As her cleverly chosen surname (Weissnix could be weiss nichts in German and might be interpreted to mean either knows nothing or not white or both) implies, Ilka is completely innocent; Carter is only too knowing, and it is the interaction of their perspectives that brings wisdom and tragic humor to the portrayal of their relationship in this novel.

Lore found her subject matter in the creative writing class that led her to write Other People’s Houses, and it was also in that class that she met the man who would serve as the model for the character of Carter Bayoux. “It’s my best book, but it took 18 years,” she said, speaking of Her First American to Matthew Schaer in a 2024 New York Times interview.

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A Pulitzer Finalist

Shakespeare’s Kitchen, a novel-in-stories, was published in 2007, more than twenty years after Her First American. It features an older, more accomplished Ilka, who takes a position as a visiting scholar at a Connecticut university and finds herself embroiled in the petty politics of academe.

Many of the stories that became Shakespeare’s Kitchen were published in the New Yorker; the most famous is “The Reverse Bug,” about a conference on genocide that is disrupted by the screams of victims somehow mysteriously incorporated into the lecture hall’s sound system.

In 2008, when Segal was eighty, Shakespeare’s Kitchen was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. That was the same year that independent publisher Melville House arranged to reissue Lucinella, which had gone out of print.

Melville House went on to publish her last novel, Half the Kingdom, in 2013. Described as “darkly comic,” it portrays an alarming uptick in advanced dementia cases in a hospital emergency room. In 2019, a collection of essays, short stories, and novel excerpts appeared as The Journal I Did Not Keep. That collection is an excellent choice for those who want to explore Lore Segal’s writing before deciding to commit to any one of her novels or short story collections.

Though she didn’t win the Pulitzer, she received numerous prestigious awards in her lifetime, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, O. Henry Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and many others. Here is the full list of her literary awards.

 

Writing Until the Very End

Lore Segal wrote right up to her death, despite the ailments of age, which in her case included diminished vision and the need for a walker. She published a series of stories about a group of elderly ladies who meet for lunch and then, because of the pandemic and later because of their decreasing mobility, meet on Zoom.

Many of these stories were collected in Ladies Lunch (2023). The ladies discuss aging and death, the loss of friends, and the failures of family members to understand what they want and need—always with the wisdom and wry humor that Segal brought to all her work.

“Stories About Us,” which appeared in the New Yorker the week before she died at the age of ninety-six, begins with the line, “Let’s get the complaining out of the way,” and ends with a discussion of the best word to use in a translation of Austrian Jewish poet Theodor Kramer.

Her editor for that story, Cressida Leyshon, recalled discussing edits with Segal while she was in hospice shortly before her death. Writing about those discussions, Leyshon said:

“Her voice was faint, but the lilt of her Austrian-accented English was clear, and she would often repeat aloud a sentence where I’d suggested an edit. Sometimes she’d agree, but at other times, with a merry incredulity, she’d say no. Of course, she implied, I should understand what a ridiculous suggestion this was! And, of course, she was right.” 

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Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

 

Further Reading and Sources

Works by Lore Segal

Fiction

  • Other People’s Houses (1964)
  • Lucinella: A Novel (1976)
  • Her First American: A Novel (1985)
  • Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007)
  • Half the Kingdom (2013)
  • Ladies Lunch (2023)

Children’s books

  • Tell Me a Mitzi. Illustrated by Harriet Pincus (1970)
  • All the Way Home (1973)
  • Tell Me a Trudy. Illustrated by Rosemary Wells (1977) 
  • The Story of Old Mrs. Brubeck and How She Looked for Trouble and Where She Found Him (1981) 
  • The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat (1985) 
  • Morris the Artist (2003) 
  • Why Mole Shouted and Other Stories (2004)
  • More Mole Stories and Little Gopher, Too (2005)
Categories: Author biography

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