Her First American

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.