How writing helped Lore Segal survive a traumatic wartime childhood

As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired Oct. 20, 2013. 

When Lore Segal sold her first short story to the New Yorker in the 1950s, she received an astounding $1,500. But Segal threw the cheque into the incinerator of her apartment building.

"Accidentally," Segal later wondered. "Or did my subconscious need to register disbelief?"

Fortunately, the New Yorker sent Segal a replacement cheque. And 60 years later, at 95 years old, Segal is still publishing funny, heartfelt stories in the prestigious magazine. The author of Half the Kingdom and Shakespeare's Kitchen, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, Segal has a recent book called Ladies' Lunch and Other Stories. It's been named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year for 2023. 

Born in 1928 in Vienna, Segal turned ten a few days before Hitler's army annexed Austria. She soon found herself on the first Kindertransport, which took 500 Jewish children out of Austria. For the next seven years, Segal lived with various families in England, though she was later reunited with her own family — first in England, then the Dominican Republic and finally, the United States. A fictionalized account of this experience became Segal's first book, Other People's Houses, published in 1964. 

Segal spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from New York in 2013. 

Writing and positivity as a means for survival

"Who's the person underneath the experience? Does the experience create [a person's] nature?

"I was going to be the person who looked at everything that happened and tried to make something out of it. Things that seemed disastrous, and are disastrous, are also the next story.

"I think the survival trick — and I've talked to other people who have gone through childhood traumas — there are two things that you can do. You can either cry and look the disaster in the eye and grieve over it. Or you can say, 'Wow,' I said to myself, 'I'm going to England!  How terrific. What an adventure.' I thought to myself, 'I've been in Czechoslovakia, I've been in Hungary and this is going to be the third country I've been in.' 

Things that seemed disastrous, and are disastrous, are also the next story.- Lore Segal

"Now that is a survival trick. I think it's also a denial. I think it's also a way to not feel or to modify what you're feeling to be able to live with what you're feeling. And for all I know, being a writer is also a survival trick. You look at something unbearable and you think, 'Oh, that's interesting. I'm gonna write that.'" 

A special mother-daughter relationship

"My mother was wonderful. She got to be 101 years old and we had a wonderful arrangement, so rare in New York. I had an apartment on the 12th floor and she had her apartment on the 1st floor on Riverside Drive. And this arrangement worked until she was 97 years old and I would go down every morning and she'd squeeze fresh orange juice. My mother was both loving and interesting to talk to. 

"We didn't always agree … I mean, I couldn't persuade her that modern art was anything to bother with or that modern music was anything to bother with. So we had the fun of that disagreement. 

"I think she was able to accept what life dealt her and to some degree — and this is where I resemble her and we've talked about that — to enjoy it. 

"I have this memory of my mother in the first place where she worked as a cook. My father worked as a very unsuccessful butler and gardener, but my mother worked as a cook. I came to visit from Liverpool when the school holidays came. 

"I remember sitting in the kitchen and she was in the scullery and she was doing the washing up. And I looked out and I saw her. I saw the steam rising above the sink and my mother had a wonderful whistle. She was whistling some lovely tune. And that is a kind of memory that gives the sense I have of her. It was not only happy, it was delicious, it was a charming, delicious tune. And there she was doing the washing up."

Friendships as close as cousinships

"One of the things, of course, that Hitler did was to decimate your family. I mean, I have cousins in Uruguay and Paraguay and Argentina, all over the world. I mean, I do have a couple of them here [in New York City], but my grandmother was one of a family of 15. In her generation, only three of them came out, but the next generation is spread all over the world. 

"And I had this notion that in that sort of situation, what you most need is an artificial set of cousins or a village, if you like. Not only a best friend, but a set of friends. And Shakespeare's Kitchen is about how intimacies are created, how they continue, how they fall apart. That's what interested me to write about, the family that is created rather than given to you. And interestingly, it seems to me, if those created friendships go on long enough, they begin to feel like cousinships. 

I do find that life is quite entertaining and I'm always positively surprised and pleased that it should be so. It's not a given.- Lore Segal

"Friendships are a matter of luck. Nobody promised you that you would have a best friend and love. There's that wonderful phrase. I think I used it somewhere: 'by joy, surprised.' I do find that life is quite entertaining and I'm always positively surprised and pleased that it should be so.

"It's not a given. I think one of the ways to deal with the kind of difficult lives that my mother had is to assume things will go wrong and then they don't. And you say, 'Wow, look at that!'"

Writing about the beauty of old age

"I'm 85 and almost everything I've written — and I'm not particularly thrilled by that fact — starts autobiographically.

"It doesn't stay that way. I have a lot of fun moving in many directions, but it does start with some aspect of my life and surely being old is the aspect of my life that I'm dealing with now and that is interesting."

Lore Segal's comments have been edited for length and clarity. 

Starting this January, the weekday replay of Writers & Company will shift from Tuesdays at 3 p.m. ET to Wednesdays at 1 p.m. The program will maintain its regular Sunday time slots at 3 p.m. ET & AT, 3:30 p.m. NT and 5 p.m. PT, MT & CT.