When Lore Groszman Segal died at the age of ninety-six in October 2024, the New York Times celebrated her as “a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels,” referring to her fiction for adults. Publishers Weekly’s obituary also acknowledged those works but gave equal weight to her stories for children. Tell Me a Mitzi, her first, and undeniably odd, picture book, illustrated by Harriet Pincus, was reprinted by NYRB Kids in June 2024, inviting renewed attention to the scope of Segal’s legacy. Mitzi and her other children’s books embody the same irreverence and honesty of her adult fiction. They dismantle clichés about parents and grandparents, allowing children and adults to assume one another’s perspectives and exchange roles, although the endings always bring a measure of stability. 

Segal’s own childhood lacked that stability. In the novel Other People’s Houses (1964), she wrote about her experience as a Jewish child refugee in England on the Kindertransport program, struggling to make sense of the irrational conditions imposed by adults. (Unlike ninety percent of the Kindertransport’s children, Lore was reunited with her parents, who also emigrated to England. Her father was imprisoned as an enemy alien and died at the end of the war.) This novel for adults succeeds in conveying the voice of a child. Tell Me a Mitzi performs the same feat in reverse, granting children a sense of control as they assume adult responsibilities. The book begins as a little girl, Martha, requests a story from her mother. The generic “story” is transformed into a specific “Mitzi,” about a child’s adventures in a world of inconsistent adults. 

Mitzi takes care of her brother, Jacob, describing the tedious mechanics of parenting: “So Mitzi got Jacob’s bottle, carried it into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and opened it and took the top off Jacob’s bottle and poured in the milk…” The sentence continues for several more lines, reflecting Mitzi’s need to record the importance of her role in redundant detail. Pincus’s strange portrayal of children with the faces of aged adults, which Marjorie Ingall terms “hideous…but also alluring,” reinforces the gravity of Mitzi’s tasks. In the second chapter, everyone in Mitzi’s family gets a terrible cold. Worse, Mitzi’s parents fail to meet the standards of parenting she had carefully described. Mother and father childishly compete over who is sicker, leading to a total collapse of care until Grandma arrives to fill the void. What could have been a terrifying situation is resolved because, even when Grandma inevitably gets sick, she proudly characterizes her illness as “the best cold she ever had.” While the end of the story is reassuring, the vulnerability of childhood hovers as a possibility. 

Tell Me a Trudy (1977) is a companion volume with the same framing device of a mother’s story. Illustrated by none other than Rosemary Wells, it is, unfortunately, still out-of-print. (The family’s dog looks very much like Wells’s beloved McDuff.) When Trudy’s aunt and uncle accompany Trudy, her brother, and their younger cousin to the park, the adults attempt a lesson about sharing toys. Their rigid definitions of “sharing” and “borrowing” lead to opposition from the children, until a frustrated Aunt Shirley resorts to the useless question, “You know what that dump truck cost me?” In the end, everyone is rewarded with pretzels, with the question of sharing still unresolved. 

In two books illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier, Why Mole Shouted and Other Stories and More Mole Stories and Little Gopher, Too, the parents have disappeared entirely. Mole lives with his grandmother, who is loving, if also a bit scary. In the chapter, “Why Mole Asked Why,” he asks her why they live in a hole in the forest. His grandmother’s answer would be at home in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, translated by Segal and poet Randall Jarrell and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Mole’s grandmother describes the hole as protection from a beast who might attack and eat him because he is sweet. Mole understands that his grandmother’s explanation is not literally true, but he also intuits that love cannot always defeat danger.  

Lore Segal, in her long life, and in her books for both adults and children, elaborated on that truth. The purpose of her books was not to retrace the path of childhood trauma. Combining irony, humor, and a deep reserve of love, she created stories rooted in compassion for young and old, while refusing to simplify the complex relationships between generations. Telling a “Lore” might well define her unique contribution to children’s literature.