Lore Segal's preoccupation with the Holocaust is expressed most directly in two of her novels, Other People's Houses (1964) and Her First American (1985). The majority of Segal's other fiction, such as the widely acclaimed Tell Me a Mitzi (1970) and Tell Me a Trudy (1977), belongs to children's literature. Her adult novel Lucinella (1976) tells the story of a Jewish heroine who resembles the fictional Lore in Other People's Houses and Ilke Weissnix in Her First American. However, Other People's Houses is the novel that deals most closely with Segal's experiences as a child refugee from Nazi Germany who came to England before World War II on a Kindertransport (children's transport).

Segal was born Lore Groszmann on 8 March 1928 into an assimilated, middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. Her father, Ignatz Groszmann, was the chief accountant in a bank; her mother, Franzi (Stern) Groszmann, was a well-educated housewife. The Anschluss of March 1938 put an...