Esteemed author and educator Lore Segal, who wrote and translated clever and sunny children’s tales alongside the autobiographical adult stories and novels informed by her early life as a Jewish refugee during WWII, died on October 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
Segal was born Lore Groszmann in Vienna, Austria on March 8, 1928, to Ignatz Groszmann, an accountant, and Franzi Groszmann, a homemaker. As she recalled in an essay for Something About the Author, “I lived the first 10 comfortable years as my parents’ only child, my grandparents’ only grandchild, my father’s and my mother’s brothers’ only niece; the center of attention, admiration and the focus of great expectations.”
On December 10, 1938, following months of persecution under Hitler’s invading troops, the Groszmanns put their daughter on a train as part of the Kindertransport effort to bring Jewish children in Europe away from Nazi-occupied areas to safety with foster families in Great Britain.
Though Segal had learned English in her Vienna school, she was surprised to face a language barrier when she arrived in England. “I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying,” she recalled in her essay. She soon caught on, though, and learned that her British hosts did not fully know what was happening back in her homeland. Compelled to inform them, she filled a student notebook “cover to cover” with what she called “my Hitler stories,” in her native German, and one of her foster sisters had the work translated into English. “That, I suppose, is how I turned into a writer,” Segal said.
Segal also wrote letters to distant cousins who had previously immigrated to London, putting the wheels in motion to rescue her parents; with help from a refugee committee, they were granted domestic servant visas and arrived in England in 1939. . But conditions were still difficult for the Groszmanns and Segal remained in the refugee foster program, living with five different families over a seven-year span. Segal’s father grew increasingly ill in the ensuing years working in various households and died in 1944.
Segal then moved with her mother to London where Segal had accepted a full scholarship to the Beford College for Women at the University of London. She graduated with honors in 1948 earning a B.A. in English literature and immediately joined her mother and other members of the family in the Dominican Republic where they awaited their opportunity to immigrate to the United States. Segal taught English at the business school in Ciudad Trujillo (then the capital), and also gave private lessons to members of diplomatic families for three years, until May 1951, when she and her mother were permitted entry and made the journey to America, beginning their new life in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
Segal’s next goal was to find a way to earn a living that would allow time for her writing—a passion that still burned bright for her. After secretarial school and a couple of clerk and receptionist jobs did not suit, she landed a position as a freelance designer at a textile factory. The job was ideal, as it allowed her to work in the afternoons and evenings and devote mornings to writing fiction. It was a schedule she kept for the rest of her life.
In 1961, Lore married David Segal, who became a senior editor at Knopf. The couple welcomed two children, Beatrice in 1962 and Jacob in 1964, before David died suddenly of a heart attack in 1970 at age 40.
Segal remained committed to establishing herself as a writer. During the 1950s she had sold several short stories to magazines including Audience and Commentary. But she got her first major break when the New Yorker accepted a story she wrote about the Kindertransport and contracted her to serialize more of her stories on the subject in the magazine between 1962 and 1964. The collection, which recounted her experiences as a refugee, was published as the novel Other People’s Houses by Harcourt Brace in 1964.
Segal described her picture books as coming in “two waves,” both of which were inspired by family. “The first lot, written in the 1960s, was for my children,” she said. The first of those titles to be published was Tell Me a Mitzi, illustrated by Harriet Pincus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), in which Mitzi asks to be told tales in which she is the protagonist, alongside her baby brother Jacob. A sequel, Tell Me a Trudy, illustrated by Rosemary Wells, followed in 1977.
Other children’s books from this period include her translation of The Juniper Tree, and Other Tales from Grimm by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm with Randall Jarrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (FSG, 1974), and The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless, Her Cat, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky (Knopf, 1985).
Forty years later, Segal produced a second wave of picture books, that she said was “for my children’s children.” Those titles included Mole Shouted, and Other Stories (FSG, 2004) and a sequel, Mole Stories and Little Gopher, Too (FSG, 2005) both illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier and featuring gentle tales about the daily lives of energetic Mole and his loving Grandmother Mole.
Segal had always supplemented her writing career with the more stable income from teaching positions. She was a professor of creative writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Bennington, Princeton, and Sarah Lawrence College on a part-time basis from 1969 to1978. Then, in her 50s, she accepted a full-time position at University of Illinois’s Circle Campus in Chicago and commuted there from New York for 14 years. Similarly, she commuted to Columbus, Ohio to teach full-time at Ohio State University from 1992 until her retirement in 1996.
Segal was still contributing short stories to the New Yorker into her final years, the last one, “Stories About Us” was published on September 29. An exhibition on her life and work, “I wanted to love Vienna, but I didn’t dare,” curated by exile studies scholar Karin Hanta, is currently running at the Bezirksmuseum Joseftadt, a local history museum in Vienna. Segal appeared at the exhibit’s opening event via livestream in February.
Michael di Capua, Segal’s first children’s book editor, offered this remembrance: “Half a century ago, I had the special privilege of working with Lore Segal on several books: her collaboration with Maurice Sendak, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm; her second novel, Lucinella; and three picture books, notably the incomparable Tell Me a Mitzi. I consider all of these books high points of my career. Lore and I drifted apart later on, but I’ve never forgotten her passionate, relentless commitment to getting every word right. I believe she always managed to do so.”
Illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky, who was a longtime friend, shared this tribute: “Lore would find interest in almost any topic; she would come at it from some unexpected angle, and make so much sense I’d wonder why I hadn’t thought of it that way. Her conversation was engaged, intense, and more often than not slightly amused. And that was why visiting her was such fun.”
Sarah Baker, executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators and Segal’s cousin, said, “I always saw Lore Segal in two ways—the famous author whose books I adored, and the fabulous cousin whose Upper West Side apartment was a magical gathering spot for me and my extended family. Her book-lined apartment was always bustling with warmth and art, and whenever I was there, Lore would take the time to connect with me and make me feel special. That’s who Lore was, and that’s why so many have that special connection with her books. I hope all her books keep getting discovered by new readers. There’s a Lore Segal book for every phase of your life, and the humor, curiosity, wisdom, and empathy she wove into every story is her gift to all of us.”
And author-illustrator Sophie Blackall, one of Segal’s close friends, remembered her this way: “Lore Segal’s first response to everything that happened to her—grief, anguish, awkwardness, discomfort, assimilation, reconciliation, loss, love—was, ‘Isn’t this interesting?’ Her second response was to write about it. ‘If I didn’t write,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do.’ The letters she wrote when she was 11 saved her parents from Nazi-occupied Austria. The picture books she wrote shaped my kids’ childhood and inspired me to become a writer. Her novels defy description, upend expectations, and leave us thrilled to be alive, and the stories she wrote every single morning made her laugh, helped her process the world, and kept her curious for 96 years.”
