Oh, the things she knew: Lore Segal

Lore Segal was born in Austria in 1928. At ten, she was one of the first children to make it out to England via the Kindertransport that was whisking at-risk Jewish youth to safe havens where Hitler couldn’t find them. Years in the UK, a stint in the Dominican Republic and thence to the US.

At ten, she wrote letters to the people you could write letters to so her parents could join her in dodging persecution. They were with her within a year.

Lore remembers the letters as the most successful act of terrible writing. But she remembered it as an act of writing.

Because she’s my imaginary friend I get to call her by her first name. It’s pronounced “Laurie” or “Lorry.” That’s the thing most people seem to want to know about her. It’s also just about all I can say about her that you can’t find more easily on her Wikipedia page.

“Dear An, You’ll love this. Love, P.”

Gift-givers are forever suggesting you’ll love what they are about to bestow unto you, even if they know you are entirely unlikely to have any traffic with adult colouring books.

Shakespeare’s Kitchen – a slim, graceful book – was more than loved. It was fallen in love with. Lore was nearly 80 when she wrote it. It was her fourth book. I blame my not living in New York for not meeting her before.

In short order, I found and consumed everything she’d written like I would a trail of salted-caramel cupcakes. Which really is sort of what it was.

I’ve often seen it written that her prose is sharp. I see how a person, reaching for the thing to say, might end up there, but I don’t think that’s quite it.

It is the cool precision that leads them there, the wit and reality that seems pulled from the very air you’ve breathed yourself (you can, after all, translate Upper West Side dialect to Trinidad Creole).

But no, what Lore has is not knife-sharp. Rather, it is a sharpening stone upon which we smooth our own thoughts. What fine weapons she could make of us.

Who is this old woman and why am I rambling on about her, so many have asked.

Here is an idea of what I mean when I try to talk about Lore – a writer I thought I could love because I loved the way she understood people. And the way she seemed both emotionally fearless yet composed. She really was a sniper.

In the Author’s Note to Shakespeare’s Kitchen, she writes: “I want to translate Göethe’s Wahlverwandschaften as ‘elective cousins,’ the cousins we choose…How do we meet people we don’t know? How do acquaintances become intimates? And I was thinking of the sadness when we divorce friends and they turn back into acquaintances who are less than strangers because they can never become future intimates.”

There is a taut isolation running through the whole paragraph and you’ve not even started to read the story as yet.

Lore never weeps all over the page. Some pain (and some joy) is bigger than the public performance the world likes. Let your need run inside. Outside, find people to be cousins.

In the world of Shakespeare’s Kitchen, cousins represent a whole community of loved ones. Ilka, the central character (and – what else? – a refugee) is adrift from her blood ties. So, quite sensibly, she sets her sights on one of her creation. I’d have done exactly the same thing. Because she wants to belong. We all want to belong. You don’t have to be from Manhattan to get that.

And that’s the thing, I always felt I got her books. In Other People’s Houses, Lucinella, Her First American, Half the Kingdom and Ladies’ Lunch she took on race, the pretensions of academia, the not-knowingness of how to navigate worlds, death, loss, writing and not-writing, aging, survival and everything you can fit in between.

She’d take eight or ten or nearly 20 years to write a book, and the people who I’d talk to would look at the lithe volumes and shrug. I wish more people would take 20 years to write a book and end up with something as close to the craft Lore achieved. What she wrote was exactly the opposite of what comes out of writing classes now. She wrote less for more value.

Lore Segal died at 96 on October 7. I hear in the past few months she continued to receive visitors. Maybe she needed her cousins.