[1][2] During that war they survived more than five years of Nazi control including being confined to the Łódź Ghetto, where they married, in occupied Poland, before being taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were eventually separated.

Brett was born as Luba Brajsztajn (Germanicised as Lilijahne Breitstein) in 1946 in Feldafing displaced persons camp, Bavaria, Germany.

"[2] Brett attended University High School, Melbourne but did not matriculate – instead of sitting two of her final exams she watched Hitchcock's Psycho.

"[6] In January 1967 Brett and Beard travelled to the United Kingdom for Go-Set, "where they experienced a swinging live music scene.

[6] In 2014 Brett published her fictionalised account of her time in the UK and US in the novel Lola Bensky, including her encounters with Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin and Lillian Roxon.

Brett regularly appeared on Uptight, one of the first weekly national TV shows devoted to pop music,[12] it broadcast for four hours on Saturday mornings, which ran from October 1967 to 1969.

[14][15] The original line-up was her then-partner Lovett, Mick Hadley (ex-Purple Hearts) and Malcolm McGee (ex-Python Lee Jackson).

[16] Renowned academic Samuel Fell explains that by traveling to London, New York, Los Angeles and Monterey in 1967, and interviewing the world’s leading pop stars including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, Lily Brett ended the sense of cultural isolation and irrelevance of many of the young 1960’s generation of Australians.

Stephanie Green of The Canberra Times described it in April that year as a set of "self-contained [stories], they are all about a group of Jewish immigrants living in Melbourne after World War II.

The characters form a community, strive to success in a new land, fend off the memories of war, and hold on to their sense of what it means to be Jewish in the face of centuries of displacement.

"[20] Green's fellow reviewer, Helen Elliott, felt Just Like That (1994) showed that "The joke, and the entire seriousness of this brilliant novel, lies in the way Brett has turned the anguish of generations into art... [and] has created an unusually lovely woman [Ester Zepler, the protagonist], full of laughter, torn with anxiety, capable of malice and brimming with love.

[22] Publishers Weekly's staff writer felt that "The hardest effect to bring off in fiction is a vision that is at once tender, deeply comic and yet aware of the ultimate sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum.

[23] Helen Greenwood of The Sydney Morning Herald finds that "Brett herself travels a brave road to joy, instead of the tracks of despair, which is not an easy path for a born worrier.

[24] Lola Bensky (2013), Brett's seventh novel was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and it received the 2014 Prix Medicis étranger prize in France.

The movie adaptation of "Too Many Men", titled "Treasure" was directed by Julia Von Heinz, and stars Lena Dunham, and Stephen Fry.