On weeping when people die – Kasia Boddy in LRB:

“Read any interview with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:

I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen.
I’m not a grand creator of new characters.
I keep rewriting everything 48 times.
I don’t have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel.
I’m bad at thinking about society.
I don’t know how to be serious without being funny.
I am not a good weeper when people die.”

(…)

“Segal’s final story appeared in the New Yorker on 7 October, the day that she died, aged 96. Her daughter and her son’s partner had taken dictation.”

(…)

“ For the first ten years of her life, Lore Groszmann lived in the Josefstadt district of Vienna. Her father, Ignatz (Igo), was chief accountant at the bank of Kux, Bloch & Co, and her mother, Franziska (Franzi), who had studied piano at the Wiener Musikakademie, oversaw a cultured, assimilated, bourgeois household. Segal remembered dance classes, jokes, skating, cousins, servants and trips to the mountains. She was an only child and felt herself ‘the centre of attention, admiration and the focus of great expectations’.
The annexation of Austria in March 1938 changed those expectations. Anti-Jewish legislation that had been passed in Germany over a period of five years was enforced in Austria within a matter of weeks. Segal, who had celebrated her tenth birthday just a few days before the Anschluss, found her life dismantling fast. Her father lost his job, their apartment was seized, and they moved to the village of Fischamend where her mother’s parents ran a dry-goods store. When the Nazis seized the shop, they returned to Vienna.
But the event that Segal later singled out as decisive took place on the night of 9 November. Throughout the Reich, SS and SA officers conducted a pogrom: setting fire to synagogues, smashing and looting shops and businesses, beating up Jews and herding thirty thousand people into camps. Kristallnacht provoked international outrage but few calls to action. On 21 November, the House of Commons voted to allow unaccompanied children to come to Britain, under strict conditions. Ten thousand were eventually rescued. Compared to the one and a half million children who died during the Holocaust, this may seem insignificant, but it was something. A similar plan was rejected by the US Congress.
Things moved quickly. Within days of the vote, the BBC broadcast a call for foster homes and the Movement for the Care of Children (later renamed the Refugee Children’s Movement) sent representatives to Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. On 1 December, the first train left from Berlin, followed nine days later by a train from Vienna. Places were like gold dust. Segal remembered hundreds of parents and children queuing at the Stadttempel, the only synagogue still standing in the city. Franzi’s cousin’s girlfriend worked for the organising committee and so Segal had what she called the ‘guilt-making good fortune’ of joining the first cohort. She was number 152 of 500.”

(…)

“Saving her parents meant stirring ‘appropriate emotion’, and this worried her. She already felt that she hadn’t hit the right note at the station in Vienna (was she some ‘species of monster’?) or at Harwich when press photographers boarded the refugee boat. She had tried desperately to attract their attention. ‘I played with my lunch bag: “Little Refugee Looking for Crumbs”. Not one of them noticed. I tried looking homesick, eyes raised ceilingwards as if I were dreaming. They paid no attention. I jumped happily; I tried looking asleep with my head on the table.’ No response. Segal’s difficulty in determining how best to behave intensified in the ‘other people’s houses’ where she spent the war. On hearing that her parents would soon be in England, she felt a ‘terrific physical relief’, observing that, suddenly, her body was ‘sensuously at ease’. But her foster mother expected visual evidence that she was ‘pleased’ and, since ‘it would never do’ to upset her, Segal jumped up and down all the way home.”

(…)

“So, what do you conclude?’ This was a question Segal’s friend Vivian Gornick would often ask and to which she would reply: ‘I’m not in the concluding business, I’m in the describing business.’ Just when you think you’ve pinned down one thing, something new happens, undermining your previous ‘facile conclusions’. Segal’s preferred account of herself, therefore, was as ‘an Austrian Jew who was educated in England and lives in America’; a formulation in which nothing is ever lost, just added to.”

(…)

“But further calamity (to use Segal’s preferred word) was to come. In 1970, when he was just 42, David had a massive heart attack and died, leaving Lore with two young children, Beatrice and Jacob. She was able to maintain her morning writing routine and keep her job as a teacher only because of her mother. Franzi lived in the same building and, every morning until she was 97, rose at dawn to squeeze grapefruit juice for their breakfast. When she died in 2005, just short of her 101st birthday, Segal described her as ‘the best mother in the world’.
One of Segal’s first projects after her husband’s death was a collaboration with Maurice Sendak on a selection of Grimm tales, which both admired for refusing to ‘pussyfoot’ around the ‘ur-terrors of childhood’. There is no pussyfooting in the fables Segal went on to write, first for her own children, and then, thirty years later, for her grandchildren. Many explore the frustrations and terrors of mothers, foster mothers and grandmothers. The Story of Old Mrs Brubeck (1981), for example, takes as its starting point Segal’s admission that she experienced ‘the calamities of my life as a palpable relief from the perennial expectation of calamity’.”

(…)

“Their first date is at a Fifth Avenue wedding party where the white groom approaches Carter and tells him ‘it’s all right’ that he once slept with his bride. When Ilka interprets this as a ‘friendly’ remark, Carter corrects her: ‘He was saying, “I am a white liberal and you’re a black son of a bitch.”’ Ilka’s day job involves filing cards into their ‘correct place’, but making distinctions after work is more complicated. The novel presents the process of categorisation as both fallible – at one point Ilka confuses a Berlin Jew for a Nazi – and reductive: being able to ‘file’ people carries the ‘concomitant loss of the likelihood that she would henceforth distinguish any member within the group’. And yet Segal also recognises that making distinctions is simply what people do. In the final pages of the novel, Ilka takes great delight in labelling a young blonde from San Francisco ‘the Californian Specimen’.
Her First American is a historical novel, looking back from the Reagan years to mid-century debates about whether, as Cayton wrote, it was possible for an African American simply to ‘live as an individual’, and whether the Black and Jewish experience could really be compared. In Cayton’s autobiography, Segal is presented as childishly competing in what Stanley Crouch, in another context, called ‘the big-time martyr ratings contest’.”

(…)

“Where am I passing? Can you tell me? No. The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words. And being old is being old. Dying is dying.’ Rereading Segal’s stories, it’s striking how many conclude with a death or a funeral, the ultimate minefields for ‘appropriate emotion’. In one, the corpse of Ilka’s husband, Jimmy, is being lifted over the bannisters when Carter telephones. ‘Christ!’ he says. ‘This is embarrassing.’ ‘No, it’s not!’ she howls back. ‘Why is being dead embarrassing!’”

Read the article here.
Calamities as a palpable relief from perennial expectations of calamity – that’s so Lore Segal.

Why is being dead embarrassing? Most probably it’s embarrassing for the people who are still alive.

And now, I have to read Cayton’s autobiography.

This is an article I wrote about Her First American. Unfortunately, only in Dutch.

And here’s an interview with Lore Segal, again only in Dutch.

How to behave according to the norms? How to produce socially accepted behavior? That’s our big task. And the novelist should deconstruct the task.