Nine months after Hitler takes Austria, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna on a train that is to take several hundred children westward to safety. For the next seven years she lives in "other people's houses, " and in this novel Lore Segal depicts with insight and wit the settings and the ways of life of the people who gave her refuge. Originally published in 1964, "Other People's Houses" is Lore Segal's first novel and the one that brought her international acclaim.
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.
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.
About the Author
Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928, and was educated at the University of London. A finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Segal has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, two PEN/O. Henry Awards, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.
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