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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Lore Segal. Photo by Alisa Douer.
Ilka Weissnix, fleeing Hitler’s Europe, lands in America and promptly falls in love with a disaffected black intellectual at least two decades her senior. This odd-duck affair, by turns thrilling and frustrating, is how she learns to become American, and it gives an idea of her creator Lore Segal’s striking gift for askew juxtaposition and reversal. As the black intellectual’s dying American dream meets Ilka’s newborn one, sorrow is trans-mogrified into joy, without disservice to either.
The book I’ve just referred to is Her First American. I picked it up a dozen years ago at the New York Public Library, attracted by the front cover’s blurb: “Lore Segal has come closer than anyone to writing the great American novel.” Well, I thought, I’m reading that. Finishing it, I knew I’d been inducted into a kind of secret cult—the cult of Lore Segal’s fans, which, I’ve since learned, includes Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Michael Cunningham, Philip Lopate, Grace Paley, and many others.
Now, on a mild winter afternoon more than a decade later, I’m talking to Lore Segal in her Riverside Drive apartment—only a few blocks up and over from my own—and the loop that this years-long journey describes is thrilling and odd. We begin on the subject of her first book in 22 years, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, which reintroduces Ilka—but Ilka Weiss, no longer Weissnix—and her creator to the world. The new book of linked stories finds Ilka working at a think tank affiliated with a New England college, teaching new immigrants English, among other tasks, but her old avidity is still alive. It yokes the book together, in fact. Ilka is on a quest to fill up her life with friends to stand in for the family she doesn’t have. “Elective cousins,” Lore Segal calls them.
