Finding a novelist’s voice… at age 80

By Cindy Mindell

MANCHESTER – For his first novel, attorney Lewis Segal decided to write what he knows – which, for an attorney who started practicing in 1960, is pretty considerable. The book, With All Due Respect, made its debut in July, the first work to be published by Leapfolio, an imprint of Tupelo Press.

The novel opens on the anniversary of D-Day in 1974. After joining a prestigious Wall Street law firm, Michael Cullen listens to one of his new partners expound on how the United States made a catastrophic mistake in failing to ally itself with Nazi Germany to defeat Soviet Communism. He had to wonder if one of his partners might be a Nazi sympathizer.

Cullen is forced to deal with this utterly unexpected issue as it resounds within the firm and, eventually, within his personal life. The novel peels back the sheath of respectability that cloaks the law firm and explores its institutionalized bigotry and the internal dynamics of the partners’ conflicting ambitions and values. Eventually Cullen finds himself enmeshed in litigation in which he represents a client he detests.

Where did the idea of a Nazi infiltrating an American law firm come from?

“Entirely from my own imagination,” says Segal, who is 81 and wrote the novel when he was 80, “but an imagination likely fertilized by the fact that I think like a Jew and, when a Jew tries to imagine the worst possible scenario for something, the word ‘Nazi’ pops up on the screen.”

Segal grew up in a “not particularly observant” Jewish home in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. He made it as far as his bar mitzvah before leaving behind Jewish education and communal involvement. Only after he got married and moved to Manchester in 1960 did he begin to take an interest in Jewish life. At the insistence of his wife, Shirley, the couple immediately joined Temple Beth Sholom in Manchester.

“That led to my deepening involvement in Jewish life; Judaism took on an importance to me that previously was largely absent from my life,” Segal says. “I learned a great deal about Judaism from my teachers, Rabbi Leon Wind, of blessed memory, and his successor, Rabbi Richard Plavin.”

Segal has served in several leadership positions in the Greater Hartford Jewish community, including on the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford executive committee, as president of Temple Beth Sholom, and as president of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Hartford. He was principal counsel in the merger of Temple Beth Sholom with Congregation B’nai Israel of Vernon – now Beth Sholom B’nai Israel in Manchester.

Segal became an attorney by chance. While he was an undergraduate at Columbia University, an older friend entered Yale Law School and insisted that Segal could be a good lawyer. The friend arranged a meeting with the dean of the law school, who offered Segal admission.

Segal never encountered the level of antisemitism that he explores in his novel, but he did leave law school at a time when “Gentlemen’s Agreement” was the order of the day.

“It was a well-known fact that the two dominant law firms in New Haven had no Jewish lawyers,” he says. “Still knowing very little about the legal profession, I assumed that that must be the case generally and this assumption seemed to be confirmed when the Wall Street firms came to Yale to recruit new lawyers. It became apparent that Jews were hired by ‘Jewish’ firms and Jews were not hired by ‘gentile’ firms.”

As for Segal: “I was hired by nobody because I had to spend six months on active duty in the army and I thought – incorrectly – that I had to defer my job search and bar exam until I had my active duty service behind me. When I finished my military commitment, I took and passed the Connecticut bar exam and went to the placement office at the law school.  There was a letter posted on the bulletin board from Lessner, Rottner, Karp & Plepler, a law firm in Manchester. The firm had eight lawyers, most of whose names sounded Jewish to me. I was hired by that firm and we moved to Manchester, where we have lived ever since.”

After several years, Segal was recruited by a leading Hartford law firm, Murtha, Cullina, Richter and Pinney, the second Jew to practice with the firm. He would go on to serve as president and CEO of Century Brass Products in Waterbury and then join the New Haven-based Tyler Cooper & Alcorn as a partner. He later worked as general counsel to Wind-up Entertainment, Inc., an independent record label based in Manhattan. He has been an attorney and member of Outside GC since 2005.

Segal began writing for pleasure about a decade ago, beginning with “The Trial of Abraham,” a play based on the biblical binding of Isaac that was performed at Beth Sholom B’nai Israel in Manchester. But actually, he’s been writing for most of his adult life.

“A good part of the work of corporate lawyers entails writing – not novels, but contracts, briefs, memoranda, letters, etc.,” he says. “I was known by my colleagues to be a skilled writer and I enjoyed making challenging and complex legal documents that were clear and understandable. When my law practice began to diminish, I became concerned about what I would do during those hours that used to be ‘billable hours.’”

With an age-related spinal disability that precluded his beloved walks in the woods, and as an avid reader of literary fiction, Segal decided to try his hand at novel-writing.

“I expected that to be a difficult undertaking and I was right,” he says. “It was difficult but it filled up those otherwise unused hours. And it was a thrilling experience. I began to write the novel with no clear idea of either how to do it or where it was heading. When I began and as I was writing, I had no expectation that the book would be published.”

But Segal then had one of those chance encounters that are the stuff of fiction. While on vacation, he and his wife befriended a man who happened to be a book editor. “I had my laptop with me and I asked him if he would be willing to read a few chapters of the manuscript and let me know candidly whether he thought it was any good,” Segal says. “The next day, he excitedly told me that the parts he had read were ‘wonderful’ and that ‘this is publishable stuff.’” The editor sent Segal’s manuscript to Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo Press, who came up with the title, With All Due Respect.

Segal is already working on his next novel, The Infielders, about four members of the 1948 New York City high school championship baseball team. With much of the plot set in the author’s hometown and high school, Segal calls the book “a biography of everyone I have ever known.”

But, meticulous writer that he is, Segal says, “I intend to write, in an ‘Author’s Note,’ that any resemblance of any person, place, or event in the book is entirely the responsibility of the person perceiving such resemblance.”