Segal’s brilliant creation of her own copious folk Lore
The Journal I Did Not Keep
Melville House, £25
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
HAD LORE Segal kept a childhood diary from the time she fled Vienna in 1938, it would always have been a moveable feast, a work under lifelong review and literary refinement. The New Yorker story-teller, novelist and Pulitzer Prize nominee has never believed in chronicles complete, or sentences set in stone.
Memory, she says, is merely “the writer’s sketchbook.” If Henry James could sit by the roadside editing a hardback copy of his recently published novel, then why should she, now 91, not re-tune and polish up her own selected stories, newly published as The Journal I Did Not Keep?
Thank goodness she has done, delivering a delicious anthology for readers relishing fresh truths and insights. Segal’s themes are those that matter to us most — friendships (which we too often betray though intending the reverse); love (hand-in-hand with emotional destruction and divorce); the meaning of memory (we rose-tint it “to make the past thinkable, the world liveable”); hope, (whose “necessary falsehoods are the tools in our survival kit”); absurd old age and death — (“you die and the first thing is you upset somebody’s day”).
Segal’s Jewish piquancy pervades the pages, whether she’s recalling the soon-to-be malodorous Knackwurst her mother tucks into her Kindertransport rucksack, or a rabbi’s restorative meetings where good intention runs rogue.
This miscellany of diamond-sharp, wry wisdom takes us from Anschluss to present-day Upper West Side via Liverpool (where the 10-year-old evacuee was first billeted), Nevada, Buckingham Palace (where she met Prince Charles), and on to hell. Segal’s vision of contemporary perdition spits no fire and brimstone – it’s seemingly a call-centre where you’re permanently on hold.
Extracts from her fiction are interleaved with columns, essays, meditations on her children’s stories and her translations of the Brothers Grimm. She has a wicked take on biblical tales: the Flood would surely have been averted if Noah’s daughter hadn’t taken so long perfecting her memo to God, wherein she stressed that even a great inundation would not halt man’s evil. Nothing can, as Segal’s own adversity bears out.
Luckily, hers were among only ten per cent of Kindertransport parents able to escape Hitler and follow their children to England, working as domestics through the war. However, the man she married in New York died after only nine years, leaving her alone to support their two children from a writing career only just getting off the ground.
Perhaps this was a comparatively mild challenge for Segal who, in Other People’s Houses, fictionalises the trauma of being despatched, aged ten, from Nazi threat to Liverpool. Here, her confused guardians could not altogether fathom why she hid under tables, wet herself, and needed them to know that she could figure-skate and dance on her toes. The Journal I Did Not Keep is the testament of one tough lady, writing new depth and context into a lifetime’s creativity.
You die and the first thing is you upset someone’s day’
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer