In December 1938, Lore Segal, who has died aged 96, was one of the first 500 children taken by the Kindertransport from Vienna to London. “It took me 13 years to get from England to New York,” she said, and her journey formed the basis of her first book, Other People’s Houses, stories originally serialised in the New Yorker, published in 1964. Most of her writing would draw on her own experience, and her sharp sense of observation; her real talent was bringing out that experience in brilliantly crafted prose. Her focus was not just on the difficulties of the outsider, but also the pressures that brought people together and often tore them apart.
She was born in Vienna, where her father, Ignatz Groszman, was chief accountant for a bank; her mother, Franziska (nee Stern), was a housewife. When the Anschluss joined Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, Ignatz lost his job and home. Seeing what was coming, the family applied to emigrate to the US, and sent 10-year-old Lore to Britain on the Kindertransport. She recalled the moment she left; everyone else was crying, but she was not. “How interesting, I thought, that I am not crying. I realised I’d decided to give up grief, and go for interesting.”
