At Vienna’s District Museum Josefstadt, an exhibition on author and translator Lore Segal is currently on display. Segal managed to flee from the Nazis in Vienna on the first Kindertransport in 1938. The Jewish Welcome Service invited Segal’s daughter and granddaughter from New York to Vienna to attend the opening of the exhibition.
Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928, the daughter of Ignatz (Igo) and Franziska (Franzi) Groszmann, a chief accountant and an aspiring musician. She grew up in Josefstadt, Vienna’s 8th district, and had to watch as the Nazis “Aryanized” her family’s apartment in 1938. On December 10 of the same year, Lore was able to escape to England on the first Kindertransport; her parents managed to join her later on. The majority of Lore’s relatives and their loved ones, however, fell victim to the Nazi terror.
Lore learned English very quickly, later studying English literature in England, and began processing her emigration through literature. In 1964, she penned her most widely known novel on this topic, “Other People’s Houses”. Eventually, Lore emigrated to New York in 1950.
Cried her way through Vienna
In the US, she kicked off her literary career in the 1960s. To this day, she works from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day at her Riverside Drive apartment in Manhattan. It was only in 1968, at age 40, that she was able to work up the courage to visit her home city again after all those years. Once in Vienna, all the pent-up, suppressed pain of the past rushed to the surface with full force. Lore Segal “cried her way through the whole of Vienna.” To this day, she has an ambivalent relationship with her native city, which is also reflected in the exhibition. Incidentally, the last time Lore was in Vienna was in 2018, for the awarding of the Theodor Kramer Prize for Writing in Resistance and Exile.
“She gave us completely free reign in the design of the exhibition and provided us with photos, drawings and memorabilia,” says Karin Hanta, who curated the exhibition. For this, she spent months researching in Segal’s private archive and at the New York Public Library, where Segal’s legacy is kept. This extensive research material was condensed to create a bilingual brochure on Segal’s life and work to accompany the exhibition. The fact that it was possible to hold this exhibition at the District Museum Josefstadt is thanks to the dedication of the museum’s director, Maria Ettl.
Source: Vienna Museum
More info on Lore Segal and the exhibition:
- https://magazin.wienmuseum.at/die-schriftstellerin-lore-segal
- https://www.bezirksmuseum.at/de/museum/josefstadt/
The exhibition “Ich wollte Wien liebhaben, habe mich aber nicht getraut” [I wanted to love Vienna, but I didn’t dare] can be seen until January 26, 2025, at the District Museum Josefstadt, 8th district, Schmidgasse 18 (Sun 10 a.m.-12 p.m., Wed 6 p.m.-8 p.m. and by arrangement)
