In December 1938, Lore Segal was a ten-year-old little girl living in Vienna Austria when she was taken from her home, parents and all that was familiar to her to live in England with strangers. She didn’t know if she would ever see her family again.
That prior March, Hitler’s Nazi troops marched into Austria and annexed the nation for the Third Reich. Segal was one of 500 Jewish children who was sent on an experimental rescue mission, the Children’s Transport, to the east coast of England. She was then placed to live with a series English foster families.
Lore Segal
Courtesy Lore Segal
“Before I left Vienna, my father had stood me between his knees and said that I must ask the English people to get my parents out of Austria—also my grandparents, also my aunt, and my twin cousins.,” writes Segal. “I said that I would.”
In fact, after she arrived in England young Segal’s letters to the Refugee Committee in London help secure her parents’ visas to come and work there. Segal began to chronicle her experiences, initially writing her story for her foster families.
“In 1938, when I lived with my first foster family in Liverpool, their questions told me that they did not understand what was happening—might be happening to my parents—back in Hitler’s Vienna, explains Segal. “My friend and champion, the youngest daughter, fifteen-year-old Ruth, brought me the kind of copy book in which English children do their home work—36 lined pages if I remember correctly.”
Ruth encouraged Segal to write. “I remember the experience so common to writing, that my words were not doing their job, so I put in sunsets and a lot if weather to enhance the missing awfulness,” shares Segal. “Ruth then had it translated into English. Two weeks ago I had an email from her daughter in London to tell me Ruth had died.”
Segal ultimately got her B.A. English Honors at The University of London and then moved to New York City. The stories were then expanded into a series that was published in The New Yorker from 1962 to 1964. In 1964, these writings were turned into her devastating and life-affirming semi-autobiographical novel, Other People’s Houses.
In her 1965 review in Commentary magazine Cynthia Ozick wrote that Segal deftly wrote a character who was “made to understand that she must be grateful for merely being alive, and instead, perhaps out of self-preserving spite, she aspires to a life beyond guilt and so brilliant that it is attainable only in images and symbols,” writes Ozick. “Oxford is one such symbol; her uncle Paul’s idealized Viennese youth, full of poetry and student wanderlust, is another.”
Over a half century since it was published, Other People’s Houses is taking on a new life. Just today it was announced that the book will adapted for the stage by Emily Feldman and three-time Obie Award winner Daniel Aukin. Jacob Stuckelman and Joseph Hayes are producing the Broadway bound play.
“Shortly after I read Other People’s Houses, I discovered that Lore Segal lived just two floors below me. I treasured her book and knew that it was kismet,” shares Stuckelman. “Lore and I became friends and I started to imagine a way to bring Other People’s Houses to life onstage.”
When asked about the thought of having her work adapted into a play Segal shared how she loves theater and the experience of watching plays. “To think of my story on the physical stage of theater is a new idea,” says Segal who is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her book Shakespeare’s Kitchen and has regularly contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.
“For a lifelong lover of the theater it will be wonderful if, in my nineties, I can see these events adapted for the stage to allow new generations to witness to the terrors human beings can inflict on each other,” she added.
And who might she envision playing the grown-up Lore? “Esther Shapiro from Unorthodox,” she says. “Maybe?”
Jeryl Brunner: Where were you in your life when you were trying to get The New Yorker to publish your stories?
Segal: I still come down the elevator with the neighbor whom I paid to type my stories in the 1950s and 1960s. I would put the clean copy into an envelope enclosing the stamped and self-addressed envelope in which it would be returned to be put into a new envelope with a fresh SASE, and sent to the next on the list of magazines. All of us, I think, always tried The New Yorker first.
I remember giving a party at which I tossed my collection of rejection slips into the air to watch them descend, a shower of monster snowflakes. By that time I had published three stories in three journals, one for a payment of two free copies, one for $15.00, and a story in Commentary which, paying by the word, sent me $138.00.
Brunner: Do you remember the moment when The New Yorker told you they would publish your writing?
Segal: That same spring, I sent The New Yorker my story about the Children’s Transport that had brought me and some five hundred children from Nazi-occupied Vienna to England. I enclosed, along with the SASE, a note saying, “Is there anybody there, beside the pencil which writes ‘Sorry’ at the bottom of rejections?” Then I left for my first residence at Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs.
One evening I was called from dinner in the baronial dining hall. My mother was on the phone. The letter from The New Yorker was not the size that could contain a returned manuscript. Should she open and read it to me? Yes, please: “The New Yorker would like to publish Children’s Transport.” Noting my recent story in Commentary about the child living with a Liverpool foster family, would I be interested in writing a series on my immigration for the magazine? It’s only recently that I captured this moment in an unpublished story about a massacre in a creative writers’ colony in which a student is killed by an exploding acceptance letter from The New Yorker.
Brunner: How alike were you to the child in Other People’s Houses?
Segal: My husband used to say that Other People’s Houses was dishonest in its presentation of a smart, bratty child and withholding what was sweet about her.
Brunner: For many of us it’s hard to imagine being separated from parents, especially so young, having to fend for yourself, not knowing if you would ever see them again.
Segal: It’s the dire situation in which my parents decided they needed to send me away that appalls me to think about. I used to watch my own darling ten-year-old walking across the room and imagined my father and mother understanding that they had exhausted the probabilities of escaping with our lives that determined them to send me out into a hope of survival with no names and no address at the other end.
Brunner: What gave you strength?
Segal: Being a child, an only child, much loved and attended to. It was annoying to the ten-year-old to have mama keep correcting the spelling mistakes in the letters I wrote home and being reminded to say thank you to my foster parents. I now believe it was endlessly good to have my mother continue to mother me across the Atlantic.
The other answer is that one is strong because one has no other option.
