Lore Segal, esteemed Austrian American writer who fled the Nazis as a child, dies at 96

NEW YORK (AP) — Lore Segal, an esteemed Viennese American author and translator whose gift for words helped her family escape from the Nazis and who later drew upon her experiences as a Jewish refugee and immigrant for such fiction as “Other People's Houses” and “Her First American,” died Monday at 96.

Segal, a longtime resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her apartment after a brief illness, her publisher Melville House said in a statement.

After settling in the U.S. in 1951, Segal wrote novels, short stories, essays and children's books and translated the Bible and Grimms' fairy tales, which featured illustrations by her friend Maurice Sendak. Her life — filtered through memory and imagination — was her greatest muse. “Other People's Houses,” released in 1964 and originally serialized in the New Yorker, closely followed her childhood in Austria, her years in foster care in London during World War II and her arrival in New York, where the growing familiarity with the city’s sights and sounds — “charged thus upon the air” — makes the “alien into a citizen.”

“Her First American” continued her early experiences in the U.S., while “Lucinella” was a comic novella inspired by her time in the 1970s at the Yaddo artist retreat in upstate New York. Segal, who taught at Columbia University, Princeton University and several other schools, satirized academic life in “Shakespeare's Kitchen.”