Her First American Audiobook By Lore Segal cover art

Her First American

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Her First American

By: Lore Segal
Narrated by: Casey Holloway
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $19.95

Buy for $19.95

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

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. Contemporary Contemporary Romance Fiction Historical Fiction Jewish Multicultural Romance World Literature Witty
All stars
Most relevant  
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.

Excellent writing. Weak reading.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator did some great accents but the exposition was so stilted it almost ruined the book for me.

Amazing writing, awful reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Uninspiring

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

A story that never goes anywhere.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I struggled to get through this story - when the reader said, “Part 2,” I audibly moaned. The writing is flat and the characters are just so unappealing. One of the worst books I’ve ever read.

Boring!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator for this book does not know how to speak German, Hebrew or Yiddish. This leads to some amusing mis-pronunciations--a character spends time on a "Kibbitz" rather than a "kih-BUTZ"--but the amusement fades and it becomes distracting and offensive. Are there no editors at Audible??

Fundamentally flawed narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.