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Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People’s Houses tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who, alongside hundreds of other Jewish children, boards the Kindertransport to England to escape the Nazi occupation and oppression in Vienna in 1938.
Over the course of the next seven years, Lore lives with various families in “other people’s houses”—ranging from the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. As the war looms and Lore becomes enmeshed in the effort to get her parents out of Austria, she also becomes a passionate writer, documenting her struggles and displacement in letters to a variety of potential sponsors. Brilliantly highlighting the cultural differences between Vienna and England, the novel showcases the immigrant experience through the eyes of a young writer who would go on to become the highly acclaimed “brilliant and boundary breaking” (Los Angeles Review of Books) star of international fiction.
Told through the unique and moving perspective of a child forced to grow up quickly, Other People’s Houses is the “groundbreaking and indomitable” (Forbes) tale of one girl’s captivating refugee experience and the strength and bravery it takes to start over—and to survive.
“An immensely impressive, unclassifiable book. On the surface it is an account of flight from the Nazis, of displacement and transplantation; but beneath that it contains an extraordinary rendering of the self.”
—The New Republic
“A brilliant novel in the form of a memoir . . . [Lore Segal has] the sharp analytic eye of a born writer.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Great sensitivity, coolness, and charm . . . the keen innocent observation of the child’s-eye view.”
—The New York Review of Books
;It is a remarkable memoir indeed that, written in New York City in the late 1950s, can so strongly resemble not the structure but the feel of postwar European fiction. While Other People’s Houses is filled with vivid portraits and some marvelous close-ups—England certainly escapes abstraction—what dominates the book is this tone: the tone of one whom history has stunned, and made go cold all over.”
—The Nation
“A precise, objectively observed recasting of her autobiography . . . [that] makes for an atypically clear and unsentimental evocation of wartime displacement.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Lore Segal (1928–2024), author of Her First American and Shakespeare’s Kitchen, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (both published by The New Press), among other works, was the recipient of a New Yorker Best Book of the Year Award, an O. Henry Prize, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and other publications.