Lore Segal: 1928-2024
Mourning someone who lived to the full into their nineties seems to miss the point, and you get the sense Lore Segal would have agreed. The Pulitzer-nominated novelist and short story writer was genial but acerbic when I interviewed her 18 months ago; I got the sense that she had no truck with fools.
Segal, who died last week aged 96, lived a colourful life of many chapters. Born a secular Jew in Vienna, she was ten when she came to England on the Kindertransport, deposited with various families, some kindly, others less so, some Jewish, some Christian. All were fodder for her writing and she documented her experiences in her 1964 novel Other People’s Houses.
Unusually, her parents escaped too, by securing domestic servant visas. Segal thrived, gaining a degree at the University of London, but her father was interned during the war on the Isle of Man and died shortly after. Mother and daughter headed overseas, living in the Dominican Republic before eventually making it to New York.
Until her death, she lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side more or less constantly, aside from brief spells lecturing in Chicago and Ohio, which she fictionalised in her short story collection An Absence of Cousins, recently republished. But her life was far from easy; her husband (editor David Segal) died after just nine years of marriage, leaving her with two small children.
To process, she wrote, prolifically, playing with her experiences but almost always inspired by them. “My instinct is not for history or journalism but fiction, and my subject is my life — what I have known and what I’ve seen,” she told me. “I’m not married to the facts, I’m married to what I think they mean.” In 1985 she wrote the well-received Her First American, based on her relationship with a black intellectual.
“Lore Segal was an extraordinary writer,” Natania Jansz, her publisher at Sort of Books, wrote in tribute this week. “You could sense on every page the workings of a uniquely sharp, yet compassionate, mind.”
That tallies with the woman I encountered on Zoom and who impressed me with her adept way with the technology. In fact, she’d found it liberating; a way to stay in touch with friends who were less physically mobile. Regular calls became tea and tipple. “We start with a cup of tea and then later we have a drink,” she explained.
Segal was a writer through and through, still at her desk daily before she died, with a story published in the New Yorker in June. She confided in Jansz that she was anticipating death in her own way. “She offered this thought. She had emigrated before in her life and not by choice, yet each time had found this interesting … and now she was emigrating again.” What a journey.
