Other People s Houses: A Novel - Softcover

Segal, Lore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565841433 ISBN 13: 9781565841437

Publisher: The New Press, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Lore Segal was born in Vienna and educated at the University of London. The author of Other People’s Houses, Her First American, and Shakespeare’s Kitchen (all published by The New Press) and other works, she is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and other publications. Between 1968 and 1996 she taught writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Princeton University, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University, from which she retired in 1996.

Review:

A brilliant novel in the form of a memoir, Other People's Houses. . . recounts the life of a Viennese refugee child who is boarded in a series of English families for seven years, and goes on to tell of [her] three years in the Dominican Republic, before she and her mother are finally admitted to the United States in 1951. . . [Lore Segal] has the sharp analytic eye of a born writer. -- New York Times Book Review

An immensely impressive, unclassifiable book. On the surface it is an account of flight from Nazis, of displacement and transplantation; but beneath that it contains an extraordinary rendering of the self. -- New Republic

Great sensitivity, coolness, and charm. . . the keen innocent observation of the child's-eye view. -- New York Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1565841433
• ISBN 13: 9781565841437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320