Lore Segal

An only child, Segal was born in Vienna, Austria, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a chief bank accountant and her mother was 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 Lore Segal joined other Jewish children on the first wave of the Kindertransport rescue mission, seeking safety in England."[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, Lore 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. Lore Segal then moved to London with her mother, where she would attend the Bedford College for Women at 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 with her mother, waiting for their US entry permit to arrive, they moved to Washington Heights, New York City, where they shared a two-room apartment with Lore Segal, her grandmother and uncle.

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.[5]

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.

In 1985, Segal's third novel Her First American was published, 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.

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."[6] 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 1961, Segal married David Segal, an editor at Knopf, who died nine years later. Together they had two children, Beatrice and Jacob.

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.[7]

• 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

• 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