Writer of
autobiographical novels and short stories drew on her experiences after fleeing
Nazi-occupied Vienna as part of the Kindertransport
Ella Creamer
Tue 8 Oct 2024 12.47 BST
Lore Segal,
the Austrian-American writer of autobiographical novels and short stories
drawing on her experience fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna for England as a Jewish
refugee and later settling in the US, died on Monday aged 96.
In a
distinctively wry and shrewd voice, her work explored themes of displacement,
assimilation, race, memory and death.
Her work
spanned five novels, 13 short stories – many of which were published
in the New Yorker – four translations and
eight children’s books. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, was a finalist
for the Pulitzer prize in 2008.
Segal “was
an extraordinary writer”, said Natania Jansz of Sort Of Books, Segal’s UK
publisher. “You could sense on every page the workings of a uniquely sharp, yet
compassionate, mind, absolutely in command of her craft”.
Segal was
born in Vienna in 1928 as Lore Vailer Groszmann to a Jewish family. In December
1938, after Hitler annexed Austria in March, Segal fled to London as part of
the Kindertransport, a British scheme designed to rescue predominantly Jewish
children from Nazi persecution by relocating them to live with foster families
in the UK.
In the UK,
Segal lived with five different foster families. The experience informed her
first novel, Other
People’s Houses, published in 1964. She stayed
in the UK after the war to study English literature at Bedford College,
University of London.
With her
mother, she moved to the Dominican Republic, where her uncle was waiting for a
family visa to enter the US. In 1951, when the visa came through, Segal moved
with her mother, uncle and grandmother to Washington Heights, New York.