Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
Her daughter Beatrice Segal announced her death.
On Dec. 10, 1938, 500 Jewish children boarded a train in Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport, as it was known, that would deliver them from Nazi-occupied territory to foster families in England. Ms. Segal, age 10, was registered as No. 152, the pampered only child of comfortably middle-class parents.
She would go on to live with four families in seven years, including a pair of pious, garden-and-house-proud sisters straight out of a Barbara Pym novel whose influence would make Ms. Segal, as she wrote later, a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.
Her parents followed her there in 1939, entering the country on domestic servant visas, which was the only route available to them. Her mother, a skilled homemaker, would rise to accept that role. But it would break her father, a former accountant, who died after a series of strokes.
Ms. Segal, with the adaptability and callousness of youth, along with her innate sense of the absurd and the detachment of a born writer, fared better. After settling in New York, she found her métier by telling tales of her exile.
“Other People’s Houses,” Ms. Segal’s memoir-disguised-as-a-novel, first appeared in serial form in The New Yorker before it was published as a book in 1964. (She became a regular contributor to the magazine.) One of its early, artful scenes describes the fallout from a knackwurst rotting in Ms. Segal’s luggage while aboard the Kindertransport. It was a last-minute treat from her doting parents that she forgets is there. Its pungent smell becomes a proxy for Ms. Segal’s sense of herself as human contraband, and also an opportunity for some humor: When the offending package is finally discovered, flooding young Lore with shame, she hears another child exclaim, “And it isn’t even kosher!”
Richard Gilman, writing in The New Republic, called “Other People’s Houses” “an immensely impressive, unclassifiable book.”
“On the surface it is an account of flight from the Nazis, of displacement and transplantation,” he wrote, “but beneath that it contains an extraordinary rendering of the self.”
It established Ms. Segal’s place in New York’s literary ecosystem, and she went on to skewer, uproariously, the chattering, questing, anxious tribe in which she found herself. “Lucinella” (1976), a fantasy-satire, took on Yaddo, the writer’s retreat in upstate New York, of which Ms. Segal was an alumna, among other familiar settings, and involved all sorts of adulterous characters: the usual literary suspects but also a pair of Greek gods.
Ms. Segal’s themes were deracination and otherness, and in precise and piquant prose she explored the costs, and the benefits, that accrued to outsiders and survivors like herself.
(The two most notable characteristics of that condition, she once noted, were an inappropriate anxiety and an inappropriate happiness.)
Her 2007 novel “Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” a dark comedy of literary manners in which a symposium on genocide goes horribly awry, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
“In Segal’s world, a world where domestic tragedies occur against the backdrop of historic human cruelty,” Sue Halpern wrote about the novel in The New York Times Book Review, “people tend to behave badly not out of a perverted sense of ambition or power but from a deep need for attachment and belonging.”
As Ms. Segal told The Associated Press in 2011: “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.”
Yet she tackled her new country’s most taboo subject — race — in “Her First American” (1985), a novel about a young European Jewish refugee and her love affair with a charismatic and catastrophically alcoholic middle-aged Black intellectual.
The book was Ms. Segal’s rendering and reckoning of her own five-year relationship with Horace R. Cayton, a Black sociologist who died in 1970 at 66. He is Carter Bayoux in her novel, and Ms. Segal’s stand-in is Ilka Weissnix, a surname that translates to know-nothing, as Ilka explains to Carter, who disputes her translation and supplies his own: not-white, because she was Jewish.
Ms. Segal and Mr. Cayton met in a creative-writing class at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan; she was in her 20s, and he was in his 50s, and it was a coup de foudre not destined to last — he was already too far gone in his alcoholism.
In the novel, the couple meet at a bar in Nevada; Ilka is searching for “the real” America on a train trip out West. Carter Bayoux becomes her guide and lover. The cultural critic Stanley Crouch, writing in the foreword to the book’s 20th-anniversary edition, called it “a quiet, unassuming, hilarious and bold novel that may or may not be a masterpiece.” He described Carter Bayoux as the most complex Black character in American fiction since the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”
The book took 18 years to write. “I knew my Horace, I knew my Carter Bayoux, and I was raring to go,” Ms. Segal said in an interview for this obituary in 2022. “But I had no idea how to make a character out of the Ilka person. I settled on making her a newcomer and a naïf because I wanted to trace her Americanization and her growing sophistication by the use of her language.”
“Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel,” Carolyn Kizer wrote in The Times Book Review in 1985. She added, “Mrs. Segal, in her mix of history, memory and invention, and the ruthless honesty which has always characterized her work, shows us ourselves, and reveals herself: Hitler’s gift to us, a real American.”
Lore Valier Groszmann was born on March 8, 1928, in Vienna, the only child of Ignatz Groszmann, the chief accountant for a Viennese bank, and Franzi (Stern) Groszmann, who oversaw the home.
After her seven-year tour of other people’s houses, she attended Bedford College at the University of London. On graduating with a degree in English literature, she went to the Dominican Republic, where her uncle, grandparents and mother had landed in a newly-established Jewish farming community. (The mishaps of this group of urbane European expatriates trying to make a go of yam farming is one of the many tragic-comic delights of “Other People’s Houses.”)
By 1951, the family was allowed entry to America, settling in an apartment in Manhattan in Washington Heights.
Ms. Segal worked, unhappily, as a clerk, a secretary and a textile designer and took night classes at the New School. After her relationship with Mr. Cayton ended, she was fixed up with David Segal, who was then working, unhappily, in his father’s textile company. (He went on to be an editor at Knopf.) They married in 1961.
By 1963, the couple had moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive, and Ms. Segal’s mother moved into her own on the ground floor. When Mr. Segal died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, a few weeks before his 41st birthday, leaving her with their two young children, Mrs. Groszmann stepped in to help, taking care of the children while Ms. Segal wrote. Until a few years before her mother’s death in 2005, at 100, they breakfasted together in her mother’s apartment every morning at 7 a.m.
Ms. Segal taught creative writing at Columbia, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington, Ohio State University and the University of Illinois Chicago, to which she commuted from New York City for 14 years. Her fifth novel, “Half the Kingdom,” was published in 2013.
She was also a prolific children’s book author and a translator of the Bible and of Grimm’s fairy tales, which she adapted into contemporary English, in a collaboration with Maurice Sendak, called “The Juniper Tree” (1973).
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Jacob Segal, and three grandchildren.
Ms. Segal’s literary career began with a flurry of rejections from The New Yorker. Her luck changed when, in 1960, she submitted a story about the Kindertransport to the magazine. Along with the required stamped and self-addressed envelope she added a note: “Is there anybody there,” she wrote, “beside the pencil which writes ‘Sorry’ at the bottom of the rejections?”
While Ms. Segal was at Yaddo that spring, her mother called to say that she’d received a letter from the magazine, and it wasn’t the usual bulky package, and should she open it? On hearing the news that her story had been accepted, Ms. Segal hung up the phone and threw up.
Ms. Segal was a precise writer, and was often irritated long after the fact by inexact word choices in earlier work. In “Her First American,” she wrote of a woman at an employment agency as having “a useless bosom.” Many decades later, while walking home one day, she thought, “not a ‘useless’ bosom, an ‘unused’ bosom,” though she did admit that “Her First American” was the only book she was satisfied with.
“If there is someone thinking these are ‘just’ cosmetic, mandarin matters, it is not so!” she wrote in an essay about the relationship between writers and their editors in 2019. “The word that matches what we see and feel explains us to ourselves and does what Robert Frost says of poetry: It stays our confusion.”
“Other People’s Houses” concluded with the author’s wonderment at her own tentative place in the New World: “But I, now that I have children and am about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.”
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