Other People's Houses

(Paperback, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria, 600 Jewish Children assembled at Vienna station to board the first of the Kindertransports bound for Britain. Among them was 10 year old Lore Segal.

For the next seven years, she lived as a refugee in other people's houses, moving from the Orthodox Levines in Liverpool, to the staunchly working class Hoopers in Kent, to the genteel Miss Douglas and her sister in Guildford. Few understood the terrors she had fled, or the crushing responsibility of trying to help her parents gain a visa. Amazingly she succeeds and two years later her parents arrive; their visa allows them to work as domestic servants - a humiliation for which they must be grateful.

In Other People's Houses Segal evokes with deep compassion, clarity and calm the experience of a child uprooted from a loving home to become stranded among strangers.

Reviews

First published 54 years ago and yet feels as timely as any book I've read this year ... beautiful, elliptical prose. * Observer *

Author Bio

Lore Segal (born in Vienna in 1928) is an American novelist, translator, children's author and teacher. Other People's Houses (1958) was the first of her five novels. It draws closely from her own experience of escaping to Britain in 1938 as part of the Kindertransports and moving from home to home, across deep divisions of class and culture. Lore Segal has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review and the New Republic.