Her First American

A Novel

Lore Segal

A classic novel of the immigrant experience

“Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.” —The New York Times Book Reveiw

She’s Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe, newly arrived in the United States. He’s Carter Bayoux, her first American: a middle-aged, hard-drinking black intellectual. Lore Segal’s brilliant novel is the story of their love affair—one of the funniest and saddest in modern fiction.

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Praise

“[A] highly original mixture of drollery and catastrophe. . . . Her First American sneaks up on you. What begins as the comic adventures of a greenhorn ends up distilling the ironies and poignancies of Jewish-Black relations in America.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Charm, warmth, humor, and a completely unsentimental compassion are exactly what Segal provides in this bittersweet, idiosyncratic love story. . . . A truly original novel.”

—Newsday

“A wonderful novel . . . Her First American is boldly comic and full of startling scenes—to read it is to be exhilarated. It’s also the kind of incredibly rich book that can make a reader pause and examine his beliefs about racism, religion, the Three Stooges, and most of all—America the amazing.”

—People

“A quiet, funny, slyly affecting novel—one that always remains under delicate control while seeming to teeter on the edge of preciousness or sentimentality.”