Other People’s Houses

A Novel

Lore Segal

“An immensely impressive, unclassifiable book.” —The New Republic

Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People’s Houses is Lore Segal’s internationally acclaimed semi-autobiographical first novel.

Nine months after Hitler takes Austria, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna aboard a children’s transport that is to take her and several hundred children to safety in England. For the next seven years she lives in “other people’s houses,” the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. An insightful and witty depiction of the ways of life of those who gave her refuge, Other People’s Houses is a wonderfully memorable novel of the immigrant experience.

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Literature

Praise

“Great sensitivity, coolness, and charm . . . the keen innocent observation of the child’s-eye view.”

—New York Review of Books

“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

“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.”