Lore Segal, the Austrian-American writer of autobiographical novels and short stories drawing on her experience fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna for England as a Jewish refugee and later settling in the US, died on Monday aged 96.
In a distinctively wry and shrewd voice, her work explored themes of displacement, assimilation, race, memory and death.
Her work spanned five novels, 13 short stories – many of which were published in the New Yorker – four translations and eight children’s books. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2008.
Segal “was an extraordinary writer”, said Natania Jansz of Sort Of Books, Segal’s UK publisher. “You could sense on every page the workings of a uniquely sharp, yet compassionate, mind, absolutely in command of her craft”.
Segal was born in Vienna in 1928 as Lore Vailer Groszmann to a Jewish family. In December 1938, after Hitler annexed Austria in March, Segal fled to London as part of the Kindertransport, a British scheme designed to rescue predominantly Jewish children from Nazi persecution by relocating them to live with foster families in the UK.
In the UK, Segal lived with five different foster families. The experience informed her first novel, Other People’s Houses, published in 1964. She stayed in the UK after the war to study English literature at Bedford College, University of London.
With her mother, she moved to the Dominican Republic, where her uncle was waiting for a family visa to enter the US. In 1951, when the visa came through, Segal moved with her mother, uncle and grandmother to Washington Heights, New York.
Segal worked as a clerk, a secretary and textile designer. At a creative writing class, she met Horace Cayton – their ensuing relationship formed the basis of her third novel, Her First American, published 1985.
After their relationship ended, she married David Segal, who went on to be an editor at Knopf. The couple had two children, Beatrice and Jacob. When her husband died of a heart attack aged 42, Segal’s mother helped her care for the children while she wrote.
Segal had a preoccupation with the word “interesting”. In the New York Review of Books, critic Vivian Gornick, a friend of Segal’s, wrote that on leaving Vienna, Segal had thought “‘Wow! I’m going to England!’” At the station, “everyone was crying; her parents cried, she did not. ‘How interesting,’ she thought, ‘that I am not crying.’ Years later she said to friends, ‘In that moment I realised I’d decided to give up grief, and go for interesting.’”
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She “had an exceptional ability to find life ‘interesting’,” said Jansz. “To spin its accidents, griefs, quandaries into sentences that on the surface seemed mildly ironic, quirky even, yet which nailed devastating truths. She did this with astonishing wit and candour.”
Segal’s Pulitzer-nominated Shakespeare’s Kitchen, published in 2007, is a novel comprising 13 stories about a group of Connecticut think tank intellectuals.
In 2023, she published Ladies’ Lunch, a novella and a collection of other stories. The titular piece is about a group of elderly friends who meet to discuss ageing.