Her First American

By: Lore Segal

Narrated by: Casey Holloway

Hailed by the New York Times as coming "closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel", Lore Segal stuns with this passionate love story of a refugee from Hitler's Europe and a witty, hard-drinking black intellectual.

For Ilka Weissnix, everything is new. Having recently arrived in the United States, she is determined to escape the immigrant communities of New York and boards a train headed west to discover "the real America". She finds Carter Bayoux "sitting on a stool in a bar in the desert, across from the railroad."

Older, portly, experienced, and black, Carter is magnetic. To Ilka, he exemplifies the values and cultures of a changing America. In order to understand her new country and her new love, Ilka throws herself into Carter's dizzying world, nurses him through his bouts of depression and his alcoholism, and becomes fascinated by stories of his amorous past. But Carter's ghosts are ever present, and soon Ilka finds herself torn between saving him and saving her own future.

With a foreword by Stanley Crouch, Her First American is the poignant story of an immigrant experience in a country of endless possibilities and of a rich and breathtaking love that is doomed from the start.

©1985 Lore Groszmann Segal, This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Know what you’re reading!

The book was good and the reader read it well but neither she nor the producer/engineer cared enough to look up a significant number of words she was mispronouncing. The internet provides an audio sample of each of those words.

Excellent writing. Weak reading.

Love the writing style which leaves the reader with the obligation to puzzle out the characters from their actions and words. Smart, spare, concise, undecorated; it’s not for everyone, but I thought it was amazing: insightful and deftly confident.
The reading, however, seemed to be detached from the intentions of the writing, and other than a good German/American accent, completely out of harmony with the content.

Amazing writing, awful reading

The narrator did some great accents but the exposition was so stilted it almost ruined the book for me.

Uninspiring

This story seems to portray the protagonist as a naive, immigrant victim of an alcoholic spirialing down to an inevitable tragic end. Even at the end of the story one does not feel that they know her. I was disappointed and bored listening to this book.

A story that never goes anywhere.

The narration was annoyingly cloy and didn’t suit the man’s voice. There is no sense of how much time passes, it’s just one long repetitive drone.