This past March, I celebrated my friend Jacob’s 60th birthday. The day was tremendously rainy — the kind of weather that works its way into every conversation.
Still, spirits were good as we milled and chatted in Jacob’s mother’s elegant apartment. His mother is Lore Segal, known to the world as an acclaimed writer and known to me as a cherished friend. During the party, Lore sat in a corner of her living room and greeted the many guests who wanted some of her time.
I, too, wanted her time; but I didn’t want to take it from others. “You have to talk to Lore!” my partner prompted as he saw me hanging back. “I will,” I said. “But I don’t want to interrupt.”
“Silly,” he responded. “You’re her friend.”
And so I am. Next month will mark 40 years since I met Jacob and, soon after, his immediate family: Lore, Jacob’s sister Beatrice and Lore’s mother, Franzi.
I met Jacob in August of 1984, in St. Louis, in my first semester of college. We bonded over an on-campus R.E.M. concert, then worked together on the school’s literary magazine and became friends. He lived in New York City; my father and I had recently moved there from the suburbs. And so, on school vacations, I met Jacob’s family too.
Lore has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for her novel “Shakespeare’s Kitchen”). She has received an O’Henry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023. Her novels, short story collections, translations and children’s books are cherished worldwide. She began publishing stories in the New Yorker in the 1950s; at age 96, she had her most recent publication there in June of this year. But when I met her almost 40 years ago, what I took in first was a warm, inquisitive woman with an engaged sparkle in her eyes. I had lost my mom to cancer a few years before, when I was 15 and my mother was 51, so Lore’s welcoming spirit was something I noted and valued right away. I remember her once mentioning that a blouse I’d just bought, with earnings from my summer job, was perfect for me. Admiring her taste as I did, and with no mother of my own to affirm my choices large or small, I was both thrilled and relieved.
What I’m about to say makes me feel foolish, and it has for many years. But since I’m telling the story of my evolving comprehension, I will admit: At first, Jacob’s family seemed quite lucky to me.
What I saw: A loving mother and a loving grandmother, living in the same gracious building on the Upper West Side. Both of them were funny and frequently laughing. Lore’s home was beautifully appointed — never ostentatious, but with an eye for beauty. Books were everywhere, and it was clear they were read and studied and loved. Jacob and Beatrice were close with Lore, Franzi and each other. Everyone got along.
I knew that Jacob’s father, book editor David Segal, had died suddenly in 1970, and that Franzi’s husband, Ignatz Groszmann, also had died young — just at the end of the war. I learned only recently that the illnesses Ignatz suffered had been exacerbated by his wartime experience; despite his immigrant visa, he ended up interned on the Isle of Man. And I learned a few years ago that a shelf I’ve seen many times in Lore’s home is dedicated to the books her late husband worked on at Knopf.
But to me, the four Segals reflected fortunate cohesion: a “happy family,” kind to each other, and kind to me as well.
Jacob told me soon after we met that Lore had been part of “Kindertransport.” When I admitted I did not know what that was, he explained, but I couldn’t fully grasp what he was telling me.
Indeed, the details of Kindertransport are hard to fathom at first. The initiative took place from 1938 to 1940 — evacuating about 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe, all without their parents. Lore was taken by train from her native Vienna to England when she was 10, in December of 1938. Jewish organizations in Europe planned the transports; child-welfare groups in Great Britain then arranged for the children’s care and education. In interviews, Lore has explained that she survived emotionally by looking at her departure to England as “an adventure.”
Lore’s parents were eventually able to immigrate to England as well, on “domestic servant” visas. Just last year I learned that Lore herself was instrumental in this. Upon her arrival in England, she wrote to the Jewish Refugee Service explaining why her parents should be brought over as well. Her letter was part of their successful application.
Her mother and father came to the United Kingdom when Lore was 11. However, due to their visa status, Lore could not live with them. She grew up in a series of five consecutive foster families before leaving for college; she graduated from Bedford College in London in 1948. Finally, in 1951, Lore and Franzi arrived in New York, along with Lore’s grandmother and uncle; the family shared a small apartment in Washington Heights.
It took me years to realize that Lore and Franzi’s decades-long proximity in New York was not a coincidence: Rather, it was a commitment, a correction, even a form of defiance. Having been forced apart, they would insistently stay together for decades after — not just in the same neighborhood, not just on the same block, but essentially in arm’s reach of one another. Lore has spoken in interviews about her mother squeezing juice for the two of them to share every morning, and of Franzi taking care of Beatrice and Jacob so she could write. Learning more about their family history reminded me that there are almost always layers beneath the stories we think we know.
Lore has been, throughout her career, both dedicated to her craft and hugely encouraging of other writers. I am among those she has encouraged — and I remember that in my first years of knowing her, I was more than happy to prattle on to her about my work. To be fair, she did ask me about it. But I cringe now in remembering my lengthy answers, and how little I asked her in response.
I was so young, and so in need of this kind of interest. Over time, of course, I have asked more and prattled less in Lore’s company. But despite my years of subsequent embarrassment about my prattling, the kind support that Lore extended to me when I most needed it has never ceased to fill my heart.
