Her first American by Segal

¶ … American

Reflections on what it means to be Her First American

My first real American.."... "Of the second class." "What means second class, please?"

Lore Segal's novel Her First American is a novel about American attitudes towards race and ethnicity. It is a re-telling of the classical American tale of a positive experience of immigrant assimilation and learning about America shaded with a far darker theme of how America has been unable to embrace a permanent outsider class of unwilling immigrants in the form of African-Americans. The immigrant Austrian woman Ilka Weissnix comes to America, not fluent in the language of the land or in the language of American racial relations. Ilka comes to America to escape persecution, only to find that America is full of its own prejudices. The man who becomes her lover, Carter Bayoux, is unfortunately all too well versed in the prejudices of his native land. Ilka sees America as a place of possibilities; Carter has become jaded, inevitably, as a result of his own experiences as a Black man in a prejudiced White land, where even respectable citizens, men with wives and children, could become his killers after dark.

Ironically, because of his status as an 'other' Carter is not considered a true American by most Whites, much like Ilka was not considered a true Austrian by her fellow countrymen. Ilka, because Carter is not like the refugees she knows in New York, seems like a "real American." She hopes he will function as her introduction to the nation she now calls home. He does, but not in the way she initially expects. Ilka leaves Vienna, thinking that America has no class system. She has come out West to Utah (and mistakenly gets off in Nevada, where she meets Carter) in search of the real America, not a New York filled with foreign refugees much like herself. If she can find the real America, she believes that she will lose her outsider status. The novel shows that it is easier, in many ways, for the immigrant Ilka to become assimilated than it is for a Black person.

Carter is very different from a typical American, even a typical African-American. First of all, he is a journalist and a teacher. Out of depression and frustration in realizing his political goals, he has turned to drink, and one of the first 'lessons' he teaches Ilka is how to smoke and drink. Carter also teaches Ilka English by his eloquent example, and her English language skills improve greatly after she meets him. Ilka learns, sadly, why he has grown so bitter about the American experience and the American dream, even while she becomes more acclimated to America. Through her exposure to Carter, Ilka learns that no nation is free from prejudice, and comes to see her own Viennese experience reflected in the experience of the Black, American journalist. Their lives are not common only in love, but also in the suffering they endure in their native lands.