It’s the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a ‘real American’. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds – ‘with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow’ – that she has fallen in love.
Lore Segal described Her First American as ‘her favourite child’, a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the charismatic Carter Bayoux, the glimpses he offers of New York’s Black cultural life and the loneliness of addiction, are drawn with nuance, wit and truth. Segal illuminates from an outsider’s perspective both the deep wounds of racism and a bright moment of Black American and Jewish solidarity.
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Lore Segal (1928- 2024) was born in Vienna and at the age of ten was evacuated to London on the Kindertransport. She settled in New York in 1951 and began writing for the New Yorker, remaining a regular contributor for over sixty three years.The author of five novels and story collections, Segal has won an American Academy Award (for Her First American), and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (for An Absence of Cousins, under its original title Shakespeare’s Kitchen) plus numerous prizes for her short stories, including the O.Henry Award (twice).Sort of Books also publish Segal’s novella, Ladies’ Lunch (2023), and republished her 1964 novel Other People’s Houses about her time in Britain as a child refugee.
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