The Impossible Life of Lore Segal
Lore Segal. Photo: © Adam Golfer.
“We were having a car accident—”
Lore Segal is telling me why she writes.
“I was with my family, and we were having a car accident—”
As if they were hosting a party, or embarking on a voyage. Receiving a gift. Beginning an argument. Having: the word suggests a moment that stretches, roomy enough to admit analysis.
“I thought, This is interesting … ”
Interesting is why Segal writes. Falling outside her building, or swimming up from general anesthesia, or even, as a young girl, boarding one of the very first Kindertransport trains, which whisked her and other Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territory to England, Segal has a tendency to think, Well, this is interesting. This is an adventure.
“You see,” she explains, “whenever something happens, good or bad, you feel like you’ve just found some gold. You can use this. And you know?” She fixes me with her smile. “It’s a pretty fun place to live.”
*
Over five books and a host of essays, translations, and children’s stories, Segal has been honing her singular voice, at once wry, witty, and morally engaged. Her themes are big—memory, genocide,, an autobiographical novel about the Kindertransport; , a cult-classic novella; , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; , a bracing fantasia on aging; and , the novel she calls her “favorite child,” which took eighteen years to write, is scandalously close to falling out of print, and follows, hilariously, heartbreakingly, the love affair between Ilka Weissnix, a young Viennese refugee, and Carter Bayoux, a hard-drinking black intellectual, in fifties America.
