Refugees are often talked about, but rarely listened to. From Washington to Budapest, we hear a lot about the immigrants plural, but too little from the immigrant singular. And that is why this novel is so moving: a refugee takes the microphone and puts herself at the centre of her own story. It was first published 54 years ago and yet feels as timely as any book I’ve read this year.
A lightly fictionalised autobiography of a 10-year-old Jewish girl’s arrival in Britain in 1938, it is told with the wide-eyed acceptance of a child living through horrible times. When the Nazis took power in Vienna, Lore Segal’s parents put their little girl on a train to England, convinced it was the only way to save her life. I cannot conceive of the pain they felt when watching her file into the station, the number “152” around her neck, never knowing if they would see her again, and the book doesn’t tell us. It is a child’s-eye view of the world. At the time, Segal was more worried about a smelly sausage in her bag than about the imminent collapse of civilisation.
While the powers lurched into war, she experienced the world via a succession of foster families, all of whom are as baffled by her as she is by them. At her first English home, she spends much of the time sitting under the table, or staring at the fire, or trying to guess how long it will take to receive an answer to her letters. Somehow, she finds the right recipients for the letters she writes, and wins visas for her parents too. This saves them from the Holocaust, but doesn’t bring happiness: they must work as domestic servants, so she cannot live with them.
Segal’s experience of England is one of committees, charitable women, parlours, miserable weather, bullying schoolmates, and curious class distinctions that she can’t understand, and she responds to it as a 10-year-old should, with sadness and enthusiasm and love and ingratitude. This is the story of a bright girl ripped from her roots and taking back control of her own life.
Because her tale is stripped of the hysteria that surrounds her counterparts in the Calais refugee camp or at the Mexican border, we can see it as the wonder that it is. Our country did the right thing by this traumatised and lonely little girl; it protected her until the world was safe for children once more. And, at first, that makes the book feel comforting, and uplifting: something to be filed alongside romanticised accounts of evacuees and the blitz spirit.
But if you translate her beautiful, elliptical prose into today’s terms, her story becomes both radical and unsettling. On their arrival by boat from the Netherlands, she and her fellows were “unaccompanied minors”, the kind of refugees that the Daily Mail would want to undergo dental checks; her heroic achievement in securing visas for her parents is an example of the “chain migration”, so hated by Donald Trump. They didn’t speak English, so how – as the White House chief of staff asked recently – could they integrate?
Of course, her story is untypical. This new edition of Other People’s Houses is timed for the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransports, but those relief trains only rescued 10,000 Jewish children, and only a thousand of those survivors ever saw their parents again. However, the fact Segal survived in Britain, then flourished in the US, is an example of how things could be in a more generous world, an antidote to 2018.
• Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal is published by Sort Of Books (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
