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.
