Lore Segal, the Austrian-American author, has died at the age of 96

Lore Segal, the esteemed Austrian-American author, has passed away at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy marked by profound literary contributions. Born in Vienna and fleeing the Nazi regime as a child, her experiences as a Jewish refugee deeply informed her writing. Segal's oeuvre includes five novels and numerous short stories, with notable works such as Other People's Houses and Her First American, which vividly depict her childhood in Austria and her immigrant experience in America . Her unique blend of humor and poignant observations resonated with readers and critics alike.

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”.

Her many admirers included such author-critics as Cynthia Ozick, Vivian Gornick and Alfred Kazin. In 2008, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel “Shakespeare’s Kitchen.” The American Academy of Arts and Letters inducted her in 2023.

Gornick would cite her “ironic intelligence" and “gift for detachment.” In her fiction, Segal set a tone that was even, objective and occasionally cutting, like her description of an artist in “Lucinella” who “tends to mumble her words inside her mouth, so as to keep the option of eating them.” She could also be intimate and familiar, with such recurring characters as her alter ego Ilka, a Viennese refugee; and Carter Bayoux, a Black intellectual with whom Ilka has an affair in “Her First American.”

After the war, Segal graduated from the University of London’s Bedford College and lived briefly in the Dominican Republic — where other family members had settled — until allowed in the United States. Before becoming a writer, she discovered the various careers she was not meant for: She was a “bad file clerk,” a “bad secretary” and “pretty bad textile designer."

Writing, at first, also didn't seem to work because she believed she had nothing to say. She had never been in love and thought “no big things” had happened to her, not even during the war. Her breakthrough came in a class at the New School for Social Research in New York.

“After the class we all kept meeting and doing our own creative writing class,” Segal told the AP. “And somebody said to me, ‘How did you get to America?’ And I began to tell the stories. And there was that experience, of people listening. It was lovely. Nobody had ever done that. Most people don’t have that experience, their story being valued.”

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Sarah H

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