Lore Segal was a master storyteller known for capturing the immigrant experience with wit and a keen eye, with the New York Times Book Review once saying, “Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.” Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1928, she and her family would become refugees in the United Kingdom after fleeing the Nazis, and would immigrate to the United States in 1951. Her writing often drew upon her émigré experience, receiving many awards and accolades including numerous O. Henry Prizes, a Grawemeyer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and others. Segal passed away on October 7, 2024, at the age of ninety-six (read a remembrance here). We’re celebrating Lore Segal’s legacy by sharing excerpts from her three New Press books.

Other People’s Houses: A Novel
By Lore Segal
Segal’s semi-autobiographical first novel was published to international acclaim in 1964 and first republished in paperback by The New Press in 1994. Other People’s Houses, which the New York Times called “a brilliant novel in the form of a memoir," follows a ten-year-old girl as she leaves Vienna nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria aboard a children’s transport that takes 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.

Her First American: A Novel
By Lore Segal
A classic novel of the immigrant experience published in 1985 and first published in paperback by The New Press in 1994. Her First American is the first time we meet the character Ilka Weissnix, Segal’s alter ego. Weissnix is a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe newly arrived in a small town in Nevada. The novel tells the story of Ilka’s love affair with Carter Bayoux, a charismatic and hard-drinking Black intellectual—one of the funniest and saddest love stories in modern fiction.

Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Stories
By Lore Segal
First published in 2007 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Shakepeare’s Kitchen features the return of the character Ilka, now named Ilka Weisz. Told through thirteen interrelated stories, Shakepeare’s Kitchen evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths. The Los Angeles Times said, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen is a delicate and droll examination of a topic you don’t often encounter in American fiction: intimate friendship between consenting adults.”