Lore Segal - Career in The United States

Career in The United States

When they arrived in the United States, Segal and her mother started speaking to each other exclusively in English.

Segal worked as a file clerk and later as a receptionist. By this time she was writing constantly, to a degree that interfered with her work. "When I would come in to take dictation, I would ask, 'Can I just finish this sentence?' And then I got fired," Segal recalled. Her next job, working as a textile designer, at least brought her close to the New York Public Library.

She started submitting stories about her refugee experience to The New Yorker and receiving rejection letters in return. In 1965 Commentary published her first story. When she next submitted a story to The New Yorker, she included a note, saying, "Who's there at The New Yorker - I know there's a pencil that keeps writing sorry at the bottom of my rejection slip." This time an acceptance letter arrived, along with a proposal that Segal write a series of refugee stories. She would later turn this serialization into her first novel, Other People's Houses.

In 1961 Segal married David Segal, an editor at Knopf. Together they had two children, Beatrice and Jacob. Her husband died nine years after they married. Segal started writing stories for her children which she later published, including Tell Me a Mitzi. She collaborated with illustrator and personal friend Maurice Sendak, producing a re-telling of the Grimm fairy tales, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm.

Between 1968 and 1996, Segal taught writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Princeton, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University from which she retired in 1996. She currently teaches at 92 Y.

Segal published her first novel, Other People's Houses, in 1964 to widespread acclaim. Collecting her refugee stories from The New Yorker and writing a few more, Segal fictionalized her experience growing up in five different English households, from the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines to the working-class Hoopers.

While writing her next novel, which would turn out to be an eighteen year process, Segal took a break and wrote Lucinella, a whimsical novella depicting the lives of New York poets through the eyes of an effervescent heroine. Within Segal's work, the novella stands out as experimental, involving elements of magical realism. "It was a lark and the lark got a bit serious…I think I would not have been able to do it if I hadn't thought of it as an interlude. I was braver because it was something I was doing while I was gathering my life, my forces. Also, one had read Garcia Marquez, right? And you suddenly realized all the stuff you could do. Everyone spoke of magical realism with a frown, and I thought, oh, that's great I love it. You can do whatever you want," Segal said in an interview. The book was first published in 1976 and later republished by Melville House in 2009 as part of their Art of the Contemporary Novella series.

In 1985 Segal published Her First American, which The New York Times praised, saying, "Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel." It tells the story of Ilka Weissnix, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, and her relationship with Carter Bayoux, a middle-aged black intellectual, "her first American". Segal based the character of Carter Bayoux on her friend Horace R. Cayton, Jr. She received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for the novel.

Segal's most recent work is Shakespeare's Kitchen, published in 2007, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Thirteen stories make up the novel, each following members of the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank. There Ilka Weissnix (now Ilka Weisz) is a new professor and the central figure of the novel.

Regarding her work, Segal has said, "I want to write about the stuff - in the midst of all the stew of being a human being - that is permanent, where Adam and Eve and I would have had the same experiences. I really am less interested in the social change." Her novels often deal with the process of assimilation, from a refugee arriving in a new country which must become her home (as in Her First American), to a flighty poet finding her footing in a constantly moving literary world (as in Lucinella). In her forward to Shakespeare's Kitchen, Segal wrote, "I was thinking about our need not only for family and sexual love and friendship but for a 'set' to belong to: the circle made of friends, acquaintances, and the people one knows."

Segal has accrued a significant following. Among her admirers are Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Michael Cunningham, Phillip Lopate, Grace Paley, and Jennifer Egan.

Segal lives on the Upper West SIde of New York City, where she is working on a new novel to be published by Melville House.