Segal, Lore Groszmann

Lore Groszmann Segal was born March 3, 1928, in Vienna, Austria. She lived through the Nazi occupation of Austria, and eventually ended up in England with her family. Following World War II she went with her family to the Dominican Republic, and eventually to the United States. She first began writing during the 1950s. Biographical Sources: Something About the Author, vols. 4, 66; Something About the Author Autobiography Series, vol. 11

Author, translator, and teacher Lore Valier Groszmann Segal was born to Franzi Stern and Ignatz Groszmann in Vienna, Austria, in 1928. In December 1938, after Hitler's annexation of Austria, her parents sent her to England on the first Kindertransport (the Refugee Children Movement) from Vienna. During World War II, she lived with various British foster families, and through her letters to the Refugee Committee in London, she helped secure her parents domestic service visas to work in England. After the War, she attended Bedford College, University of London, and in 1948 received a degree in English literature. She spent the next three years living with relatives in Sosua, Dominican Republic, where she worked as a teacher and writer. In May 1951, she and much of her family emigrated to New York City. She spent parts of 1959 and 1960 at the Yaddo artists community, and sold several short stories to the New Yorker. She married literary editor David Segal in 1961; together they had two children, Paul (b.1962) and Beatrice (b.1964).

In 1964, Segal published her first novel Other People's Houses, based on her childhood experiences as a refugee in England. Over the next decades, she published three widely regarded novels - Lucinella (1976), Her First American (1985), and Shakespeare's Kitchen (2007) - and many short stories, essays, translations, and children's books, including Tell Me a Mitzi (1970) and a collection of Grimm tales entitled The Juniper Tree, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (1973). Segal taught writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Princeton University, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University. Among the many awards and honors she received are the Clifton Fadiman Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellowship, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, the O. Henry Prize, and she was finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lore Segal lives in New York.

David Irwin Segal (1928-1970) was born to Harry and Stella Segal, in New York City. He earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. After college he worked at his father's firm Dabern Textiles, and in 1962 joined the publishing company McGraw-Hill as a reader and later associate editor. From 1965 to 1966 he worked as senior editor for the New American Library. His next positions were as fiction editor then editorial director for Harper & Row (1967-1969), and finally senior editor at Knopf (1969-1970). He died in December 1970 at the age of 42.

Franziska (Franzi) Stern Groszmann (1904-2005), Lore's mother, is also well represented in the collection. She was born in Austria, married Ignaz (Igo) Groszmann in 1927, and emigrated to England with her husband in March 1939. There they worked as domestic help for wealthy English families until the British Government interned Igo as a "German speaking enemy alien." Igo died from a stroke shortly before the war ended. Franzi joined her brother Paul and parents in the Dominican Republic shortly after the death of her husband, and moved to New York city with her daughter in 1951. There she worked as a private nurse for newborns on the Upper West Side. She died in 2005 at the age of 100.

Other family members documented in this collection include Lore's father, Ignatz (Igo) Groszmann (1895-1944); his brother Max (Mimi) Groszmann (b.1897) who emigrated to Panama; Lore's uncle Paul Stern (b.1911) who emigrated first to England in 1939, then to a Jewish enclave in Sosua, Dominican Republic, in 1940, and finally to New York in 1950; her aunt Erna, uncle Ernst, and cousin Inge Curth; and grandparents Joseph Stern (1912-1948) and Rosa Bemedik Stern (1877-1955), who owned a shop in Fischamend, Austria, and opened a grocery store in Santo Domingo; Rosa eventually moved to New Jersey.