Decimated, Then Reassembled on Arrival: Lore Segal’s Legacy

Na’amit Sturm Nagel pays tribute to the late Lore Segal, a novelist who wrote autobiographically.

By Na’amit Sturm NagelDecember 15, 2024

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

LORE SEGAL’S FIRST NOVEL, Other People’s Houses (1964), is narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, named Lore Segal, who escapes Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport at the age of 10. Once in England, Lore (the character who may also be the author) lives with foster families until she eventually makes her way to the Dominican Republic and finally to New York, following the same trajectory as her namesake. In his 1975 book The Autobiographical Pact, Philippe Lejeune argued that the difference between a novel and an autobiography is that in the latter, the writer, narrator, and protagonist share a name and identity, uniquely positioning the genre to tell the reader “the truth.” Yet Segal, writing 10 years before Lejeune articulated this theory, had already begun to question genre boundaries, seeing herself as a “novelist” who wrote Other People’s Houses “autobiographically,” but not as an authority on “the truth.” In fact, contrary to Lejeune, Segal sees her dual position as both protagonist and author working to place “the truth” entirely beyond her grasp.

Segal wrote before the emergence of the autobiography boom of the 1970s and ’80s, and though her book offers a brilliant and boundary-breaking example of life-writing conventions, it fell through a literary-critical crack and has not been analyzed alongside other works of autobiography, memoir, or autofiction to reveal her role as a pioneer in reinventing the genre. The Paris Review labeled the book an “autobiographical novel” and The New Republic called it “unclassifiable,” but as early as 1965, Cynthia Ozick, who reviewed the book for Commentary, characterized it as Segal’s “memoirs.” When readers consider the reinvention of autobiography and memoir, they typically turn to canonical texts from the 1970s such as Roland Barthes’s anti-autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), in which he asks the reader to engage with the text that shares his name “as if spoken by a character in a novel.” They might also consider Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), in which the author interweaves her own life story with those of her mother and ancestors, using a first-person perspective even though she did not directly experience those events herself. Others might point to inventive life writing in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), in which she recalls coming of age in Harlem and discovering her sexuality. Lorde coined the term “biomythography” for her book because it “has the elements of biography and history and myth,” but she wrote almost 20 years after Segal published her novel.

Elie Wiesel’s 1956 memoir Night appeared in English in 1960, while Segal’s stories of experiencing Nazi Germany as a child came out in The New Yorker the following year. She would not have had access to many models of autobiographical writing about the Holocaust or known how her work would be received. Understanding the literary landscape in which Other People’s Houses first appeared reveals how Segal was experimenting by placing her memoir squarely in the novel category but still including the tropes of traditional autobiography. She clearly hoped that the melding of styles—such as paying pedantic attention to historical detail while entirely fictionalizing a backstory for an individual’s life—would problematize the hardened genre categories and animate her narrative.

Segal originally published the majority of the book as short stories in The New Yorker between 1961 and 1964, and when she compiled them, she included the subheading “a novel” along with a preface explaining her genre choice: “I am at pains to draw no facile conclusions—and all conclusions seem facile to me. If I want to trace the present from the occurrences of the past I must do it in the manner of the novelist. I posit myself as protagonist in the autobiographical action. Who emerges?” This preface reveals how Segal’s struggles with the “facile conclusions” of autobiographical writing led her to claim the title of “novelist” rather than “autobiographer” or “memoirist.” Segal categorizes the text as a novel not because she wants to avoid being seen as the narrative’s protagonist but because she appreciates the latitude an imaginative approach provides to access the complexity of the author’s own story and to question, rather than declare, “who emerges.”

Segal’s novel works against the grain of its assigned category to highlight how writing one’s story always simultaneously eclipses and reveals truths about one’s past. She emphasizes her awareness of this paradox at the heart of the categorization of her text in her new afterword to the 2018 British edition of the novel, in which she addresses the reader’s frustration with what they might see as the book’s miscategorization: “As a novelist writing autobiographically I get impatient with the reader who wants to know what ‘really’ happened; as a reader I might ask something like the same question.” The unreliability of her childhood memories makes it impossible to write what “‘really’ happened” and continues to be the central reason that her categorization of the text does not shift. Segal’s frustration with the reader is not that they are asking the question “what really happened?” but that they don’t realize this is the author’s central question as well. Her 1965 preface and 2018 afterword repeat the refrain “so what really happened?” four times precisely because the writing itself is the exploration of this question. Segal’s ambivalent relationship to life-writing genres reveals the inherent friction one should feel in relation to “truth” when trying to pin down one’s own story or when reading someone else’s. By narrating her own writing experiences, she advocates for a reconsideration of what childhood memories can illuminate and conceal, and how even adults do not have access to what “‘really’ happened.”

In the novel, Lore begins writing nonfiction to create a new narrative that will open people’s eyes to what is really happening in Nazi Germany when she discovers that nobody seems to know. She writes about her own traumatic experiences in letters, revealing truths in the hope that they will save lives. But as she narrates her original attempts, she contemplates how multiple perspectives on the past shatter its mythical uniformity; her singular perspective cannot capture “the truth” if it does not exist. The haziness of childhood memory, especially when affected by trauma, also makes accessing what “really” happened impossible. The novel explores her frustration with the lifesaving act of life writing because that writing only saves lives when it is objectively accurate, but it is impossible to be objective about one’s own experiences. In the preface, Segal positions the life and death stakes of writing at the center of her life and her text:

I did my first writing—I mean writing that understood itself to be writing—when I was ten years old. I was one of five hundred Jewish refugee children housed in Dovercourt Camp in England’s east coast. We were waiting to be distributed among English foster families. […]

That winter of 1938 was one of the coldest in English memory. I sat in my coat and gloves and wrote a letter. It was a tearjerker full of symbolisms—sunsets, dawns, and the rose in the snow outside the window, “a survivor,” I wrote, “wearing a cap of snow askew on its bowed head.” The letter made its way to the Refugee Committee, which found my parents a job and got them the sponsors and visas to emigrate to England, proving that bad literature makes things happen.

The bureaucratic letter transcends its formal limitations by incorporating the mechanisms of fiction—hyperbole, metaphor—in writing about real, lived experiences. Segal’s signature self-mocking humor describes her “tearjerker” letter as “bad literature,” and reading her novel, we can understand why. Throughout the book, she generally rejects figurative descriptions, usually offering the reader multiple angles on any event. The lack of adjectives in the sentence that patly describes her parents’ emigration exemplifies Segal’s preference for clear and concise descriptions. Yet this melodramatic piece of writing saved her parents and taught her that “bad” writing fulfills an important role. The early use of fictive tools to describe reality showed Segal that blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction enables one to see their reality differently, and perhaps even change it.

This early writing episode stages metafictionally all of Segal’s anxieties about writing an autobiography. The child narrator’s traumatic relationship with the events she describes and the “tearjerking” effect her story must convey compromises her objectivity. The adult Segal recognizes these pitfalls, exposing the mechanisms of storytelling and the elusiveness of objective truth, and in the process shows the reader multiple ways to shape a story:

At the house after school, I had begun to write my autobiography, to let the English know, as I had promised my father, what had happened to us under Hitler. But when I came to write it down, I felt a certain flatness. The events needed to be picked up, deepened, darkened. I described with gusto the “horror-night” of Schuschnigg’s abdication—not mentioning how unsolemnly rude my mother had been to Tante Trude. I wrote how, the next morning, “the red flags waved like evil ghosts in the wind and I stood still and held my hands in horror before my eyes, having already an inkling of the charm of the darling Germans.” (‘Die lieblichen Deutschen’ were the words I had heard my mother use.)

The problem with adding a fictional flair to “deepen” and “darken” the events is that it inadvertently omits significant details, such as the tension between her mother and aunt. This passage explains why Segal takes the opposite approach as the adult writer of Other People’s Houses. Though she relies on simple description and direct dialogue, her writing never appears “flat.” Even the title’s simplicity demonstrates Segal’s stripping down of language in evocative ways. Though she no longer hyperdramatizes, she still questions how to get the right details of any story into focus. As a child, she did not “already” have “an inkling of the charm of the darling Germans,” but in writing that she did, she could wrap her mind around uncontrollable past events. In her effort to write autobiographically, she remembers her need to think proleptically as a child and thus develops the opposite inclination as an adult. Looking back, she reanalyzes her past, calling her book a novel in order to relinquish her responsibility to know or describe anything definitively or to search for perfect accuracy in language.

Throughout Segal’s career, she continued experimenting with the slipperiness of genre categories to write effectively about her past. In 2019, she released a collection of new and selected writings titled The Journal I Did Not Keep. The book is divided into three parts—“The Journal I Did Not Keep,” “Fiction,” and “Nonfiction”—yet readers would be hard-pressed to find clear distinctions among the writing in each section. The title of the collection implies that the reader of the text will be privy to excerpts from a personal journal and that this autobiographical writing will also be somehow anachronistic. The entries in “The Journal I Did Not Keep” depict stories that were not recorded at the time they occurred. But what is a journal that is not kept and why was it not kept? Segal did not keep a journal during those years because she did not want writing to replace memory; she held “the assumption that memory would select what could be useful; what I was going to forget could not have been worth remembering.” And yet she discovers that these past experiences are worth recalling and can now be accessed through the prism of memory and the imaginative details of storytelling. Segal realizes in this later writing that, once again, it is necessary to avail herself of the tools of fiction to make up for what she lacks in historical accuracy. The reason she did not keep a journal could just as easily apply to why she did not call her first book a memoir. The passing of time inevitably involves forgetting, and how to write about constantly transforming memories of past experiences is a theme that preoccupies Segal throughout her career.

Segal published five novels, numerous short stories, and many other kinds of writing over her 60 years as an author; her final work, “Stories About Us,” appeared in the print edition of The New Yorker on October 7, 2024, the same day the 96-year-old author died. The tale contains Easter eggs for loyal longtime readers of Segal’s work, including the character Bridget, a writer, who serves as an uncanny doppelgänger for the author herself. The story follows a group of female friends who meet in person and on Zoom to discuss their lives. Bridget tells the others that she awaits feedback about whether an old friend likes a story she has written that, she says, is “about a group of women friends getting old together.” When her friends object that the story is “about us,” Bridget retorts:

I don’t have to invent, but I have to imagine us. People, pacemakers, and glaucoma are not the stuff that can be pasted into a Microsoft document or onto a sheet of paper. Remember “Star Trek”? You’re beamed to a different dimension by being decimated and then reassembled on arrival. I turn us into the words that would allow my friend Anna to imagine us.

Bridget explains that the art of evocative writing requires the author to break down their conception of reality, leaving it to the reader to reconstruct the words by infusing them with imagination, in a transubstantiative act that only creates reality on the page because it emerges from invention. If the author sticks to the facts, they come out as flat as the reality young Segal attempted to depict in her earliest childhood writing. Through her final publication, Segal continues to assert that imagination remains the central tool with which the writer transposes facts into “words” that magically come to life for the reader. There will never be an answer to what “‘really’ happened,” but one can get closer to understanding reality by asking that question repeatedly when they read and write.