Up and Down Riverside Drive

Read any interview​ with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:

I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen.

I’m not a grand creator of new characters.

I keep rewriting everything 48 times.

I don’t have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel.

I’m bad at thinking about society.

I don’t know how to be serious without being funny.

I am not a good weeper when people die.

There is no false modesty here, more a persistent self-reckoning. As she also liked to say, ‘there are things that I have accomplished and things I failed to do.’

Segal’s accomplishments, over eighty years, have long been acknowledged, even if they remain for the most part under the radar. That her books are in print is due to the commitment of small publishers such as the New Press and more recently Melville House in the US, and Sort of Books in the UK. In the last few years, these efforts have intensified. The last year alone has seen the publication of An Absence of Cousins, a new title for the Pulitzer-nominated Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2007); Tell Me a Mitzi (1970), one of her best-loved children’s books; and several more ‘flash fictions’ in the sequence that formed the backbone of the 2023 collection Ladies’ Lunch. Last year, Segal was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in February 2024, an exhibition about her life and work opened in Vienna, the city in which she was born. Segal’s final story appeared in the New Yorker on 7 October, the day that she died, aged 96. Her daughter and her son’s partner had taken dictation.

Those who know Segal’s work are familiar with the story of her childhood, what she called, with some weariness, her ‘ur-story’. Twenty years ago, she compared herself to the Ancient Mariner who ‘in his latter days got really tired of rehearsing his old trauma’. But, like him, she kept telling it. For the first ten years of her life, Lore Groszmann lived in the Josefstadt district of Vienna. Her father, Ignatz (Igo), was chief accountant at the bank of Kux, Bloch & Co, and her mother, Franziska (Franzi), who had studied piano at the Wiener Musikakademie, oversaw a cultured, assimilated, bourgeois household. Segal remembered dance classes, jokes, skating, cousins, servants and trips to the mountains. She was an only child and felt herself ‘the centre of attention, admiration and the focus of great expectations’.

The annexation of Austria in March 1938 changed those expectations. Anti-Jewish legislation that had been passed in Germany over a period of five years was enforced in Austria within a matter of weeks. Segal, who had celebrated her tenth birthday just a few days before the Anschluss, found her life dismantling fast. Her father lost his job, their apartment was seized, and they moved to the village of Fischamend where her mother’s parents ran a dry-goods store. When the Nazis seized the shop, they returned to Vienna.

But the event that Segal later singled out as decisive took place on the night of 9 November. Throughout the Reich, SS and SA officers conducted a pogrom: setting fire to synagogues, smashing and looting shops and businesses, beating up Jews and herding thirty thousand people into camps. Kristallnacht provoked international outrage but few calls to action. On 21 November, the House of Commons voted to allow unaccompanied children to come to Britain, under strict conditions. Ten thousand were eventually rescued. Compared to the one and a half million children who died during the Holocaust, this may seem insignificant, but it was something. A similar plan was rejected by the US Congress.

Things moved quickly. Within days of the vote, the BBC broadcast a call for foster homes and the Movement for the Care of Children (later renamed the Refugee Children’s Movement) sent representatives to Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. On 1 December, the first train left from Berlin, followed nine days later by a train from Vienna. Places were like gold dust. Segal remembered hundreds of parents and children queuing at the Stadttempel, the only synagogue still standing in the city. Franzi’s cousin’s girlfriend worked for the organising committee and so Segal had what she called the ‘guilt-making good fortune’ of joining the first cohort. She was number 152 of 500.

At the station, Segal tried to convince her parents that it was all a ‘lark’. She later learned that Igo ‘went to bed and lay ramrod stiff for two days’ after her train departed. Ninety per cent of the rescued children would never see their parents again. Segal was lucky; the family was reunited in Liverpool the following March, on her eleventh birthday. But ‘lucky’ is not the right word. She had arrived in England believing that it was now her ‘job to save her parents’. It was the urgency of this task, she always claimed, that made her a writer.

Saving her parents meant stirring ‘appropriate emotion’, and this worried her. She already felt that she hadn’t hit the right note at the station in Vienna (was she some ‘species of monster’?) or at Harwich when press photographers boarded the refugee boat. She had tried desperately to attract their attention. ‘I played with my lunch bag: “Little Refugee Looking for Crumbs”. Not one of them noticed. I tried looking homesick, eyes raised ceilingwards as if I were dreaming. They paid no attention. I jumped happily; I tried looking asleep with my head on the table.’ No response. Segal’s difficulty in determining how best to behave intensified in the ‘other people’s houses’ where she spent the war. On hearing that her parents would soon be in England, she felt a ‘terrific physical relief’, observing that, suddenly, her body was ‘sensuously at ease’. But her foster mother expected visual evidence that she was ‘pleased’ and, since ‘it would never do’ to upset her, Segal jumped up and down all the way home.

She also became adept in the verbal equivalents of these gestures. Before the Kinder were sent to foster homes, most spent some weeks in a Butlin’s summer camp at Dovercourt Bay near Harwich. The huts weren’t built for the severe winter of 1938, and Segal sat in coat and gloves writing letters to convince the refugee committee to help. In one ‘tear-jerker’, she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose outside the window: ‘a survivor wearing a cap of snow askew on its bowed head’. ‘It was not a particularly apt metaphor,’ she later conceded, ‘but I was wonderfully proud of it.’ And she should have been. The committee soon found sponsors, visas and jobs for her parents, proving, Segal wryly noted, that ‘bad literature makes things happen.’

Even at the time, she was ‘embarrassed’ by the skills of manipulation she was learning to hone. After filling a school notebook with ‘Hitler stories’, she decided that ‘events needed to be picked up, deepened, darkened,’ mostly by adding references to nature and the weather. Later, recalling this process and the reception of the stories, she was less interested in her foster mother’s sympathetic sobbing than in the fact that her younger self ‘sat and watched her’. One of the most distinctive features of Other People’s Houses (1964) is the self-consciousness with which Segal observes, and judges, herself: ‘I had a clear notion of myself crying’; ‘I felt my face smiling’; ‘Often when I giggled … I would stop in horror, knowing I must be heartless.’

Segal spent years searching for a narrative voice to describe these events. One important model was Jane Austen, because Austen cares about ‘how honest you are’, especially with yourself. In Segal’s account of her childhood, honesty often entails making her younger self unlikeable: emphasising her ‘prickliness’ with her foster parents and her unreasonable irritation with her sick father and with her grandmother’s table manners. This is a strategy familiar from other Holocaust stories – think of Art Spiegelman’s depiction of his irascible survivor father in Maus – where it serves as a bulwark against what Spiegelman calls ‘Holokitsch’. But in Segal’s work, that piercing honesty exposes everyone. The Groszmanns had been allowed entry to Britain on a ‘married couple’ visa, which meant employment as cook-and-butler but not being able to live with their daughter. In Other People’s Houses, their employer is given the name Mrs Willoughby (just one of the book’s nods to Austen; the Darcys also feature). One day she asks Franzi if she would mind serving tea although it’s supposed to be her Sunday off. ‘My mother minded it very much,’ Segal notes; until, that is, Mrs Willoughby offers to find some bedding for Lore’s impending visit. Franzi’s vow ‘never to think an ungrateful thought about any English person again’ is, however, quickly broken. At the linen cupboard, Mrs Willoughby steers her away from the ‘good sheets’ – ‘you don’t want to get her used to this kind of thing’ – towards a ‘rust-stained’ pile. But then, as Franzi bristles, Mrs Willoughby tells her to take time off to collect the child from London. Now in tears, Franzi murmurs ‘how good you are.’ But the last word goes to Mrs Willoughby who reminds her servant to be back in time for dinner. ‘We can just have something quick, don’t you know. Maybe cold meat and a nice green salad and a tomato aspic that you can prepare in the morning, before you leave?’

‘So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding business, I’m in the describing business.’ Just when you think you’ve pinned down one thing, something new happens, undermining your previous ‘facile conclusions’. Segal’s preferred account of herself, therefore, was as ‘an Austrian Jew who was educated in England and lives in America’; a formulation in which nothing is ever lost, just added to.

In a 2021 interview with another friend, Cynthia Ozick, Segal declared her devotion to the principle of ‘and’, the opposite of the ‘or’ that characterises Ozick’s thinking. All of Segal’s books, from Other People’s Houses to Ladies’ Lunch, have an ‘and’ structure – each component in the ‘serial story’ has its own shape. This has moral as well as literary implications. ‘I keep thinking about what the other side must look like,’ Segal would say when asked about politics. Questioned about her peripatetic childhood, she complained about those who wanted her ‘to stay appropriately grieved’ when she also felt it had been a ‘fascinating experience for a future writer’.

In 1951, thirteen years after Segal’s father had applied to move to the United States, the family’s quota numbers came up and those who were still alive set off for New York. It was too late for Igo; he died in 1945, just before the end of the war. In the intervening six years, Segal had studied English at Bedford College for Women (now part of Royal Holloway) and spent three years with Franzi’s remaining relatives in the Dominican Republic. Manhattan, or rather the Upper West Side, would be her final destination, the place she would live for the next 73 years. ‘I am totally comfortable in a very small part of the world,’ she insisted, ‘and it’s up and down Riverside Drive.’

Determined to become a writer, she enrolled in an evening class at the New School. The only question was ‘what to write about’. During the 1950s, as Philip Roth would later explain, there was a widespread belief that the ‘devils’ had been defeated ‘once and for all’ and there was nothing more to say about the Holocaust: it was time to ‘start over again, en masse, everyone in it together’. Even The Diary of Anne Frank, published in English in 1952, was marketed as a ‘universal’ story about adolescence.

Segal always acknowledged that she was ‘less interested in the history than in being a writer’, but when she mentioned the Kindertransport at a party she realised that there was an audience for her not ‘extreme Holocaust experiences’. In 1958 she published part of what would become Other People’s Houses in Commentary. Most of the rest appeared in the New Yorker. It’s surely no coincidence that it was in 1960 that the magazine urged her to develop a series of stories about her time in Britain during the war. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960, and the testimony of survivors at his trial the following year, forced Americans to confront the Holocaust. Segal’s serial was still running two years later when the magazine published a controversial account of the trial by Hannah Arendt.

In 1961, Lore married David Segal, a young literary editor who had made a name for himself rescuing the rejected (as one of their number, William Gass, put it). David ‘insisted’ that his wife should return to Vienna to face her past. Finally, she said, she was able to weep, ‘the whole week in Vienna, and all over the Austrian Alps’. Then it was time to go home to Riverside Drive.

But further calamity (to use Segal’s preferred word) was to come. In 1970, when he was just 42, David had a massive heart attack and died, leaving Lore with two young children, Beatrice and Jacob. She was able to maintain her morning writing routine and keep her job as a teacher only because of her mother. Franzi lived in the same building and, every morning until she was 97, rose at dawn to squeeze grapefruit juice for their breakfast. When she died in 2005, just short of her 101st birthday, Segal described her as ‘the best mother in the world’.

One of Segal’s first projects after her husband’s death was a collaboration with Maurice Sendak on a selection of Grimm tales, which both admired for refusing to ‘pussyfoot’ around the ‘ur-terrors of childhood’. There is no pussyfooting in the fables Segal went on to write, first for her own children, and then, thirty years later, for her grandchildren. Many explore the frustrations and terrors of mothers, foster mothers and grandmothers. The Story of Old Mrs Brubeck (1981), for example, takes as its starting point Segal’s admission that she experienced ‘the calamities of my life as a palpable relief from the perennial expectation of calamity’. At the end of a long day trying to determine where trouble might be lurking, Mrs Brubeck finds its phantom source waiting under the eiderdown. She embraces it tightly, whispering ‘I’ve got you where I can keep my eye on you.’ The Story of Mrs Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat (1985), meanwhile, can be read in terms of Segal’s experience as a ‘prickly’ foster child, although it’s from the foster parent’s point of view. Hoping for a ‘cosy’ cat, a woman gets one who bites her toes and refuses to sit on her lap. Despite all this, they end up spending many years together, Mrs Lovewright keeping her shoes on and Purrless tolerating an occasional scratch between the ears. A happy ending, but not a sentimental one.

By shifting into the slightly fantastic, Segal was able to develop a new voice for her adult fiction too. In 1976 she published Lucinella, a fairy tale about the world of writers’ retreats, little magazines, college symposia and parties that resemble a ‘New Yorker cartoon full of chinless show-offs’. Negotiating the inevitable literary ‘seesaw between arrogance and abjection’, her eponymous heroine sleeps with Zeus and keeps bumping into her younger (wannabe) and older (has-been) selves. But she also spends a great deal of time searching for the perfect paper to line her kitchen shelves. John Leonard thought Lucinella ‘the nicest person ever to appear in a novel about New York writers’.

Several of her later stories also drop a fantastic conceit into a recognisable social situation: a little Kafka to unsettle the Austenian flow of conversation. In one of the stories in The Absence of Cousins, an academic conference on whether there should be a statute of limitations on genocide (followed by ‘a wine and cheese reception’) is disrupted by ‘a device whereby those outside were able to relay into a room what those inside would prefer not to have to hear’: that is, the howls and screams of the tortured. But if the task of the ‘reverse bug’ is to undermine academic kitsch, it ultimately fails to do its job. Unable to ‘be horrified’ by the world ‘24 hours a day’, the academics continue to have affairs and apply for grants for ‘a Scream Project’. In Half the Kingdom (2013), another grant is awarded to investigate why all the patients in a New York hospital suddenly develop dementia.

Segal also liked the way that Kafka kept returning to the figure of K. Asked about the recurrence of her own character Ilka, she explained that ‘the only character I know is my left rib, so let me face up to that. Ilka is Ilka. However, she’s not the same Ilka.’ Ilka was introduced in Her First American (1985), a novel that Segal worked on for eighteen years and always regarded as her best. It draws on the five-year relationship she had in her twenties with the African American sociologist Horace Cayton Jr, best known today as the co-author of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal work of urban ethnography. In his autobiography, Long Old Road, Cayton describes many ‘stimulating’ conversations with Segal, but he also acknowledged that her role in the book is to be ‘the person to whom I explain myself and the black experience’. Segal, too, sets up her immigrant heroine’s naivety – her surname is Weissnix, which she translates as ‘Knownothing’ – against the urbane and cosmopolitan Carter Bayoux. He teaches Ilka about sex and jazz, the names of sandwiches and how to drink whiskey. But most of all she learns about the tacit protocols (a favourite word of Carter’s) of Jim Crow America.

Their first date is at a Fifth Avenue wedding party where the white groom approaches Carter and tells him ‘it’s all right’ that he once slept with his bride. When Ilka interprets this as a ‘friendly’ remark, Carter corrects her: ‘He was saying, “I am a white liberal and you’re a black son of a bitch.”’ Ilka’s day job involves filing cards into their ‘correct place’, but making distinctions after work is more complicated. The novel presents the process of categorisation as both fallible – at one point Ilka confuses a Berlin Jew for a Nazi – and reductive: being able to ‘file’ people carries the ‘concomitant loss of the likelihood that she would henceforth distinguish any member within the group’. And yet Segal also recognises that making distinctions is simply what people do. In the final pages of the novel, Ilka takes great delight in labelling a young blonde from San Francisco ‘the Californian Specimen’.

Her First American is a historical novel, looking back from the Reagan years to mid-century debates about whether, as Cayton wrote, it was possible for an African American simply to ‘live as an individual’, and whether the Black and Jewish experience could really be compared. In Cayton’s autobiography, Segal is presented as childishly competing in what Stanley Crouch, in another context, called ‘the big-time martyr ratings contest’. In Her First American, however, things are more complicated. On the one hand, Carter’s anxiety and insomnia align him with Ilka’s mother, and his translation of Weissnix is ‘Notwhite’. On the other hand, he reminds Ilka that to say that experiences are ‘parallel’ is to admit that they never meet, ‘except in infinity’.

Like​ so much else in Segal’s work, the debate between distinction and affinity remains unresolved. In later stories Ilka worries about her habit of ‘interjecting’ her own autobiography into ‘the other person’s story’ while eagerly seeking a ‘family likeness’ with other people. In ‘An Absence of Cousins’, she is ‘always asking people how they had met’. A ‘refugee from New York’ (if only to Connecticut), Ilka is once again forced into confrontations with ‘other people’s doors’, ‘other people’s bedrooms’ and other people’s phone numbers. ‘What a lot of people there are that one doesn’t know.’

Segal also loved having a ‘set’ to belong to. She was a dedicated attendee of reading groups: one spent five years reading Genesis verse by verse; another met at her house just a few weeks before she died to discuss Henry James’s The Ambassadors. And then there was the small group of women whom, every month or two, for many years, she met for lunch or, latterly, spoke to on ‘blessed Zoom’. They discussed their lives and their favourite authors: Proust, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Austen. And like Austen’s Emma and Mrs Watson, they shared the ‘conviction of being listened to and understood, of being always interesting and always intelligible’.

Their ‘habit of conversation’, or perhaps more, their ‘habit of arguing’, forms the basis for the stories in Ladies’ Lunch. ‘Ladies’ lunch’ has as many rules as Fight Club, the first being that the phrase should always be ‘pronounced in quotation marks’, the second restricting discussion of the aches and pains of old age to twenty minutes. The rest of the time they follow an ‘agenda’ – everything from house-clearing and falling asleep in the movies to the excluded middle and the contemporary obsession with identity. There is no attempt to make anything ‘add up’. ‘Yes, but why?’ remains the generative ur-question.

Segal never lost her ability to see both sides of the story: recognising that the ‘pink lies’ of memory make ‘the past thinkable, the world liveable’ while despising euphemisms such as ‘elderly’ or ‘passing away’. ‘Where am I passing? Can you tell me? No. The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words. And being old is being old. Dying is dying.’

Rereading Segal’s stories, it’s striking how many conclude with a death or a funeral, the ultimate minefields for ‘appropriate emotion’. In one, the corpse of Ilka’s husband, Jimmy, is being lifted over the bannisters when Carter telephones. ‘Christ!’ he says. ‘This is embarrassing.’ ‘No, it’s not!’ she howls back. ‘Why is being dead embarrassing!’ Lucinella, meanwhile, gets to observe the mourners at her own funeral. Pleased to see an old friend with reddened eyes, she then notices that his face is flushed ‘with the effort to keep himself from smiling’. ‘It’s all right,’ she silently tells him, ‘don’t worry.’