Moved from Vienna to Britain by the Kindertransport in 1938, Segal is famed for her autobiographical work dealing with themes of displacement – all with her trademark wit.
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Celebrated Austrian-American author and translator Lore Segal died on Monday at the age of 96.
Segal's words not only helped her family flee the Nazis, but also shaped her poignant explorations of the Jewish refugee and immigrant experience in works like "Other People’s Houses" and "Her First American".
Such was her literary prowess that in 2008 Segal was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel "Shakespeare’s Kitchen", while the American Academy of Arts and Letters inducted her in 2023.
A longtime resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, Segal died in her apartment after a brief illness, as confirmed by her publisher, Melville House.
After relocating to the USA in 1951, Lore Segal crafted a diverse body of work that included novels, short stories, essays, and children's books. She also lent her talent to translating the Bible and Grimms’ fairy tales, the latter of which featured illustrations by her friend Maurice Sendak. Segal drew inspiration from her own life, weaving memory and imagination into her narratives.
Her 1964 novel, "Other People’s Houses", originally serialised in The New Yorker, offers a vivid portrayal of her childhood in Austria, her experiences in foster care in London during World War II, and her arrival in New York. Through her evocative prose, she captures the transformative power of the city, illustrating how the once-foreign landscape gradually turns the “alien into a citizen”.
"Her First American" delves deeper into Segal's early experiences in the US, while her comic novella "Lucinella" draws inspiration from her time at the Yaddo artist retreat in upstate New York during the 1970s.
A passionate educator, Segal taught at prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and Princeton, where she brought her sharp wit to bear on academic life in her satirical work "Shakespeare’s Kitchen".
In 2019, she compiled her fiction and nonfiction in the anthology "The Journal I Did Not Keep", in which she reflected on both the significance and inherent imperfections of attempting to recapture the past.
“I believe that the act of remembering and telling the story of what we remember will always be to some extent fatal to the thing remembered,” she wrote. “So what really happened?”
Born Lore Groszmann in 1928, Segal had a comfortable upbringing in a prosperous Vienna neighbourhood. The Nazi annexation of Austria a decade later, however, saw her family send her on the Kindertransport to London to escape the rising tide of antisemitism. This pivotal moment in her life is explored in Mark Jonathan Harris’ Academy Award-winning documentary Into the Arms of Strangers, where Segal and her mother reflect on their harrowing experiences.
Her writing had a huge impact long before Segal found fame, though: she wrote so many letters to British authorities that they granted her parents the right to join her in London, where they worked as domestic servants.
Segal married the literary editor David Segal in 1961 and had two children. Her husband died of a heart attack in 1970.