In December 1938, Lore Segal, who has died aged 96, was one of the first 500 children taken by the Kindertransport from Vienna to London. “It took me 13 years to get from England to New York,” she said, and her journey formed the basis of her first book, Other People’s Houses, stories originally serialised in the New Yorker, published in 1964. Most of her writing would draw on her own experience, and her sharp sense of observation; her real talent was bringing out that experience in brilliantly crafted prose. Her focus was not just on the difficulties of the outsider, but also the pressures that brought people together and often tore them apart.
She was born in Vienna, where her father, Ignatz Groszman, was chief accountant for a bank; her mother, Franziska (nee Stern), was a housewife. When the Anschluss joined Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, Ignatz lost his job and home. Seeing what was coming, the family applied to emigrate to the US, and sent 10-year-old Lore to Britain on the Kindertransport. She recalled the moment she left; everyone else was crying, but she was not. “How interesting, I thought, that I am not crying. I realised I’d decided to give up grief, and go for interesting.”
Although her parents managed to get British visas as domestic servants, and joined her a few months later, her father, as a German-speaking immigrant, was interned on the Isle of Man; he died a few days before the war ended. Meanwhile, Lore moved frequently with her mother’s positions. During an illness in 1940, her mother read Dickens to her. When she finally went outside she saw, in Guildford, a solitary rose on a bush covered with snow, which struck her as a metaphor for the Jews of her homeland. She resolved to be a writer, and, partly to explain to the mostly unaware English, filled her notebooks with “my Hitler stories”.
In 1948 she took a degree in English literature at Bedford College for Women, University of London, then she and her mother joined her grandparents and uncle in the Dominican Republic, awaiting US visas. They worked on a farm and her grandfather ran a shop, before Lore, her mother and her uncle finally moved to Washington Heights, New York, which had so many German Jewish immigrants it was known as Frankfurt on Hudson. Lore worked as a clerk and secretary and took night courses.
In a creative writing class at the New School for Social Research, she met Horace Cayton, a much older, black sociologist; she called it love at first sight. Although the relationship was doomed by his alcoholism, it provided the core of her 1985 novel, Her First American, in which a Jewish refugee, Ilka Weissnix, falls in love with Carter Bayoux, a diffident, alcoholic, black intellectual. Weissnix, phonetically, can mean “know nothing” in German, but also, as Bayoux points out to her, “not white”. The critic Carolyn Kizer said Segal “may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel”.
Segal was already submitting stories; at the Yaddo writers’ retreat in upstate New York in 1960 she learned that her first story about leaving Vienna had been taken by the New Yorker. Her relationship with Cayton had ended, and she had been fixed up with David Segal, whom she married in 1961. Segal, unhappy in his father’s garment business and perhaps inspired by his wife’s success, became an editor at the publishers Alfred Knopf.
Meanwhile, Lore received a number of fellowships allowing her to work on translations: with the poet WD Snodgrass she published Christian Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs (1967) and, with another poet, Randall Jarrell, The Juniper Tree (1973), a classic collection of Brothers Grimm stories, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. In 1970 the first of her eight children’s books, Tell Me a Mitzi, told of a grandmother who arrives to look after her daughter’s kids.
In that year David died of a heart attack, leaving Lore with their daughter, Beatrice, and son, Jacob. The family lived on Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan, where her mother had an apartment in the same building. Franziska helped with the children, allowing Lore time to write and teach, originally close by at Columbia, Princeton and Sarah Lawrence, but eventually in positions at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Ohio State University, to which she would commute from New York. She had breakfast with her mother every day until Franziska, at 97, announced she would be more comfortable in a nursing home. She died in 2005, aged 100.
Lore drew on her experience at Yaddo for her short novel Lucinella (1976), in which Zeus and Hera intrude in the lascivious world of an artists’ and writers’ retreat; the story seems to be a New World take on the sensibility of fin de siècle Viennese intellectual society. Segal wrote slowly, constantly searching for the perfect phrase. Her next book, Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007), was crafted from seven New Yorker stories and six previously unpublished ones. Its main character, again called Ilka, is a visiting scholar at a thinktank attached to a small university in Connecticut, where the personal intrigues are framed by a symposium about genocide. It was nominated for a Pulitzer prize.
Her later books dealt with ageing. Half the Kingdom (2013) was a novel in which stories were told by another Ilka. The fiction collection Ladies’ Lunch (2023) gathered elderly artists and writers in Manhattan; the title story had appeared in the New Yorker and in The Journal I Did Not Keep (2019), which mixed journalism and fiction. She said she had never kept a journal: “I assumed memory would be my editor.”
Her final story, Stories About Us, was published in the New Yorker in September. It features Lucinella and Grandmother Mole from her children’s books, and in it Ilka is trying to translate a 1938 poem by Theodor Kramer. The last verse recalls her Guildford roses:
Who is outside ringing at the door?
How the fuchsia blooms so near
Dearest, pack me my toothbrush,
And don’t cry,
They are here.
Segal spoke of the “emotional backpack” she kept ready. She said she considered her later life “a fortunate interim, in my head”. In an interview published the day before she died, she said: “Being old is being old. Dying is dying. You must not be scared to say it.”
She is survived by her children.
• Lore Segal, writer, born 8 March 1928; died 7 October 2024
