Preview
  • Her First American

  • By: Lore Segal
  • Narrated by: Casey Holloway
  • Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (22 ratings)

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Her First American

By: Lore Segal
Narrated by: Casey Holloway
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Publisher's summary

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.
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What listeners say about Her First American

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing writing, awful reading

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

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

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.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

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.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Boring!

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.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Fundamentally flawed narration

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??

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3 people found this helpful