Lore Segal

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Lore Segal (born March 9, 1928), née Lore Groszmann, is an American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer, and author of children's books. Her novel Shakespeare's Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.^[1]

Early life[]

An only child, Segal was born in Vienna, Austria, into a middle-class Jewish family, her father a chief bank accountant and her mother a housewife.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Segal's father found himself jobless and threatened. He listed the family on the American immigration quota, and in December that year Segal joined other Jewish children on the first wave of the Kindertransport rescue mission, seeking safety in England. Her number was 152. Before they parted, Segal's father told her, "When you get to England and meet an English person, say, 'Please get my parents and my grandparents and my Uncle Paul out.'"^[2] Segal described her attitude toward her task in a 2007 interview:

It seemed to me that it was something I should be doing constantly, constantly. That I should be doing without doing anything else... When I caught myself laughing, I would feel a shock to the heart that I was laughing instead of asking somebody to save my parents.^[1]

Though Segal knew little English when she arrived, she picked up the language in six weeks.^[2] In a 2009 interview, she recalled

One thing to do when you leave your parents is to howl with horror. The other thing is to not howl and think, 'Wow, I'm going to England, this will be an adventure.' Which is the one I did.^[2]

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.^[2]

On her eleventh birthday, her parents arrived in England on a domestic servants visa. Despite his refugee status, Segal's father was labeled a German-speaking alien and interned on the Isle of Man,^[3] where he suffered a series of strokes. He died a few days before the war ended. Segal then moved to London with her mother, where she would attend Bedford College for Women, part of the University of London, on a scholarship. She graduated in 1948 with an honors degree in English literature.^[4]

In 1951, after spending three years in the Dominican Republic, their American quota number came through.^[4] Segal and her mother moved to Washington Heights, New York City, where they shared a two-room apartment with her grandmother and uncle.

Career[]

When they arrived in the United States, Segal and her mother started speaking to each other exclusively in English.^[2]

Segal worked as a file clerk and later as a receptionist. By this time she was writing constantly, to a degree that interfered with her work: "When I would come in to take dictation, I would ask, 'Can I just finish this sentence?' And then I got fired."^{[citation needed]} Her next job, working as a textile designer, at least brought her close to the New York Public Library.^[2]

She started submitting stories about her refugee experience to The New Yorker and receiving rejection letters in return, except for a section of memoir that appeared in the July 22, 1961 issue. In 1965, Commentary published her first story. When she next submitted a story to The New Yorker, she included a note, saying, "Who's there at The New Yorker – I know there's a pencil that keeps writing sorry at the bottom of my rejection slip." This time an acceptance letter arrived, along with a proposal that Segal write a series of refugee stories. She would later turn this serialization into her first novel, Other People's Houses.^[5]

In 1961, Segal married David Segal, an editor at Knopf. Together they had two children, Beatrice and Paul. Her husband died nine years after they married. Segal started writing stories for her children which she later published, including Tell Me a Mitzi. She collaborated with illustrator and personal friend Maurice Sendak, producing a re-telling of the Grimm fairy tales, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm.

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 currently teaches at 92 Y.^[6]

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 five different English households, from the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines to the working-class Hoopers.

"A lightly fictionalised autobiography of a 10-year-old Jewish girl’s arrival in Britain in 1938, it is told with the wide-eyed acceptance of a child living through horrible times," the Guardian said after Other People's Houses was reprinted in 2018. "When the Nazis took power in Vienna, Lore Segal’s parents put their little girl on a train to England, convinced it was the only way to save her life. I cannot conceive of the pain they felt when watching her file into the station, the number “152” around her neck, never knowing if they would see her again, and the book doesn't tell us. It is a child's-eye view of the world. At the time, Segal was more worried about a smelly sausage in her bag than about the imminent collapse of civilisation.[1]

In 1985, Segal published Her First American, 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. 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, each following members of the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank. There Ilka Weissnix (now Ilka Weisz) is a new professor and the central figure of the novel.

“Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” her fourth work of fiction for adults, comes 43 years after the publication of her roman à clef, “Other People’s Houses,” and 22 after the well-received novel “Her First American,” says the New York Times. "In that book, Segal tells the story of Ilka Weissnix, a young woman displaced by the Holocaust as a child, who, traveling across the United States by train, meets a man who ends up schooling her in displacement and integration. The man, Carter Bayoux — her first American — is black and an intellectual. He knows something about cultural dissonance." As for Elka's name change: "Ilka’s surname is now Weisz instead of Weissnix, so that she has gone from “know-nothing” to “wise” or, as Carter would have it, from “not white” to “white.” Ilka is now so assimilated that, as a protagonist, she stands on her own."

Her latest novel Half the Kingdom was published by Melville House in October 2013.

Regarding her work, Segal has 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."^[7] 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). In her forward to Shakespeare's Kitchen, Segal wrote, "I was thinking about our need not only for family and sexual love and friendship but for a 'set' to belong to: the circle made of friends, acquaintances, and the people one knows."^[8]

Segal has acquired a significant following. Admirers of her work have included Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Michael Cunningham, Phillip Lopate, Grace Paley, and Jennifer Egan.^[5]

Personal life[]

In 1961, Segal married David Segal, an editor at Knopf, who died nine years later. Together they had two children, Beatrice and Paul.

Segal and her mother, Franzi Groszmann, appeared in the film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2000. 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.^[3]

Segal lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where "her walls [are] a gathering of paintings, knickknacks and ... sketches by her old friend Maurice Sendak ..."^[9]

Work[]

Novels[]

• Other People's Houses (1964)
• Lucinella (1976)
• Her First American (1985)
• Shakespeare's Kitchen (2007)
• Half The Kingdom (2013)

Short stories[]

• "Burglars in the Flesh" (1980)
• "A Wedding" (1981)
• "The First American" (1983)
• "An Absence of Cousins" (1987)
• "The Reverse Bug" (1989)
• "At Whom the Dog Barks" (1990)
• "William's Shoes" (1991)
• "Fatal Wish" (1991)
• "Other People's Deaths" (2006)
• "The Arbus Factor" (2007)
• "Making Good" (2008)
• "Spry for Frying" (2011)
• "Ladies' Lunch" (2017)

Translations[]

• Gallow Songs of Christian Morgenstern (1967)
• The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (1973)
• The Book of Adam to Moses (1987)
• The Story of King Saul and King David (1991)

Children's books[]

• Tell Me a Mitzi (1970)
• All the Way Home (1973)
• Tell Me a Trudy (1979)
• 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) (Illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky)
• Morris the Artist (2003)
• Why Mole Shouted and Other Stories (2004)
• More Mole Stories and Little Gopher, Too (2005)

Awards[]

• Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars Fellowship, 2008
• Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Shakespeare's Kitchen, 2008)
• PEN/ O. Henry Prize Story, ("Making Good," 2008)
• Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006
• Best American Short Stories, ("The Reverse Bug,"1989 )
• The O. Henry Awards Prize Story, ("The Reverse Bug,"1990)
• University of Illinois, Senior University Scholar, 1987–1990
• National Endowment for the Arts, Grant in Fiction, 1987–1988
• American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1986
• Harold U. Ribalow Prize, 1986
• Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, 1985
• Artists Grant, The Illinois Arts Council, 1985
• Grawemeyer Award for Faculty, University of Louisville,1983
• National Endowment for the Humanities, Grant in Translation, 1982
• National Endowment for the Arts, Grant for Fiction, 1972–1973
• Creative Artists Public Service Program of New York State, 1972–1973
• American Library Association Notable Book selection (Tell Me a Mitzi, 1970)
• National Council on the Arts and Humanities Grant, 1967–1968
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1965–1966

External links[]

• Lore Segal Author Profile Melville House
• Lore Segal Papers Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library
• Lore Segal "Coming to America" Video Series The New Yorker
• Jennifer Egan Reads Lore Segal The New Yorker
• Lore Segal Profile Jewish Women's Archive
• Spotlight on Lore Segal Random House/O. Henry Prize
• Lore Segal on Memory as the Writer's Notebook "The New Yorker," March 18, 2019
• Lore Segal Reads Dandelion "The New Yorker, March 25, 2019

References[]