Lore Segal / Lore Groszmann (F / Austria, 1928), Holocaust survivor
Lore Segal / Lore Groszmann (F / Austria, 1928), Holocaust survivor.
- KEYWORDS : <Austria> <Kindertransport> <Britain> <United States>
- MEMOIRS : Other People’s Houses (1964).
Biography
Lore Segal is a respected writer whose unique background informs much of her work. Born on March 8, 1928, the only child of solidly middle-class parents in Vienna—Lore’s father, Ignatz Groszmann, was chief accountant at a bank; her mother, Franzi (Stern), was a homemaker—she experienced a dramatic change when, shortly after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, she was one of a group of five hundred Jewish schoolchildren quickly sent to England. For the next thirteen years, she lived in several countries and with many different families—earning a B.A. from Bedford College, London, along the way—before achieving her independence and settling in New York. In 1961, Lore Groszmann married David Segal, an editor; they had two children, Beatrice and Jacob, before David’s sudden death in 1970. Segal’s experiences as a refugee formed the basis of her first significant publication, the novelistic autobiography Other People’s Houses (1964).
NOTES : Lore Segal was born in Vienna. She arrived in England in December 1938 in a Kindertransport. She campaigned tirelessly to save her parents, writing letter after letter to the Jewish Refugee Committee and various British authorities, until they also were allowed to come on a domestic servants visa. Forbidden to reside with her parents in their new places of employment, Segal lived with different foster families, five in total. With the war, despite his refugee status, Segal's father was labeled a German-speaking alien and interned on the Isle of Man where he suffered a series of strokes and died a few days before the war ended. Segal then moved to London with her mother. She attended Bedford College for Women, part of the University of London, on a scholarship and graduated in 1948 with an honors degree in English literature. In 1951, after spending three years in the Dominican Republic, their American quota number came through and they settled in the United States ... The author of Other People’s Houses, Her First American, and Shakespeare’s Kitchen (all published by The New Press) and other works, she is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and other publications. Between 1968 and 1996 she taught writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Princeton University, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University, from which she retired in 1996 ... In 2000 Segal and her mother, Franzi Groszmann, appeared in the film Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Segal's mother was the last survivor of the parents who placed their children in the Kindertransport program. She died in 2005, one hundred years old.
Book : Other People's Houses (1964)
- Lore Segal, Other People's Houses: A Novel (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1964).
"Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People’s Houses is Lore Segal’s internationally acclaimed semi-autobiographical first novel ... Nine months after Hitler takes Austria, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna aboard a children’s transport that is to take her and several hundred children to safety in England. For the next seven years she lives in “other people’s houses,” the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. An insightful and witty depiction of the ways of life of those who gave her refuge, Other People’s Houses is a wonderfully memorable novel of the immigrant experience."--Publisher description.