Her First American

Hailed by the New York Times as 'coming closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel'

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.

Autorentext

Lore Segal (1928-2024), a Kindertransport refugee from Vienna, moved to New York in the early 1950s. For six decades, her stories were published in The New Yorker. Her First American draws on her five-year relationship with the Black American sociologist Horace Cayton Jr. It took her eighteen years to write and won an American Academy Award. Sort of Books also publishes Segal's novels, An Absence of Cousins and Other People's Houses, as well as her acclaimed story sequence, Ladies' Lunch, written in her 90s.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank (2014) and the short story collection Fat Time (2023). He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Carnegie Medal.

Klappentext

With an introduction by Jeffery Renard Allen

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.

Zusammenfassung
Brilliantly acute The New Yorker