Lore Segal, born on March 8th, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, has written more than 20 books for children and several highly respected novels for adults. We know her best for writing Tell Me a Mitzi and Tell Me a Trudy, and the well-regarded The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. If you have seen the documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, then you are familiar with another side of her work. This is her story, a part of her childhood. She was one of 10,000 Austrian, German, and Czech children whom the British government brought to England, by train, for safety before World War II. In 1938, when she was 10 years old, she was taken from her parents and placed on the Kindertransport. She stayed in Dovercourt Camp in England until a foster home was found for her. This ten-year-old spent much of her time writing to the London refugee committee, pleading with them to bring her parents to England. She was successful in her request. Her parents became a cook and a butler in the south of England. Soon after the war began, her father was taken to the Isle of Man and isolated as a "German-speaking enemy alien." After having a stroke, he was released, but he died during the last week of the War. Lore and her mother moved to the Dominican Republic after the war, and finally to America.
She has taught writing at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Illinois, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, and Ohio State. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ms. Segal has published reviews in the New York Times Book Review and stories in The New Yorker. The Chicago Tribune said of her, "Lore Segal is. . . one of those rare people who combine art, eccentricity, honesty, and wisdom and who, by a change of tone, an altered inflection, produce such enchanting effects that the listener is swept along."
