My Teacher

My teacher was one of the people I most wanted to see whenever I visited New York City. Usually I’d call her as soon as I was settled, and when she answered the phone, I’d say, “Hi, this is Jane Bernstein,” and she’d say, “Jane Bernstein!” with such delight. For all I knew, she would have been just as pleased to hear from the plumber or housecleaner; it didn’t matter. It was thrilling to hear her voice and then to arrange a time when we might meet. But in the summer of 2024, I put off making the call. That was the summer I turned 75 and she was 96. Each time I thought about phoning her, I feared that when I said my name, she would say, “Who?” When I thought of her no longer knowing who I was, I was so bereft, it was as if she was already gone.

Her name was Lore Segal, but often, when I spoke of her to friends or to my own students, I referred to her as “my teacher,” though nearly 50 years had passed since I’d sat in a classroom with her. We’d met in the fall of 1975, when I was in my first semester in the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. I was 26 and too tender to show off my writing, so although I’d finished a novel and some lumpy, plotless stories, almost no one had seen a single word of anything I wrote. When I sat at the seminar table in the shabby room in Dodge Hall, all I knew about the woman who’d be teaching our class was that she’d recently been widowed. I’d never heard her name or read anything she wrote. I hadn’t known that she’d been on the Kindertransport, the first children’s transport out of Austria in 1938 after the Nazis came to power, and that at 10 years old, she had arrived in England alone and then lived in one house after another.

The woman who took her place at the end of the table was small and self-assured, at least to me, with a pale face and untamed curls. I couldn’t have guessed her age, though at that time in my life, 40 and 60 seemed pretty much the same. She was wry and particular, her whole demeanor changing when someone expressed something pompous or sentimental, and she said with conviction that no one ever again needed to describe someone smoking a cigarette or getting into and out of a car. She also said that for a reader to remember a particular detail, you had to write it one and a half times. (This last “rule” is both impossible to follow and true.)

What I remember best about that semester was the smell of mimeograph fluid on student manuscripts, the empty bookshelves in a room so grim that I imagined myself asking for permission to paint the walls during semester break, and my teacher reading sections from published works—a few paragraphs of Gogol, a page-long story by Leonard Michaels. She had an edge of accent I might have described as European, sophisticated, and when she leaned toward a text, I saw the obvious pleasure she took in sharing a passage and felt the pleasure welling up in me. When had I last heard a story?

Lore held student conferences at her apartment on the Upper West Side, not far from school. When it was my time to meet with her, I stood outside her building, fluttery and excited. The place seemed so grand—the cool lobby of her building, with its tiled floor, reverberating with an echo when I spoke her name at the desk; the black door to her apartment; the bright living room with a baby grand piano and books and comfortable chairs. Lore set a tray of cookies and tea in delicate china cups on a coffee table, and we sat beside each other while she went page by page through my novel-in-progress manuscript.

No one had ever before read my work so closely. Or seen anything special in me. My mother hadn’t: If praise had been in her heart, out of superstition she did not articulate it. Neither had my previous teachers. I was a quiet girl, an unmemorable student. I’d done well enough as an undergraduate because I liked to read and write, and still, I hardly remembered that girl—why should anyone else? And now this extraordinary moment, my teacher reading my words and laughing.