Synopsis
Jimmy Castle, a homeless. Handsome young drifter broke and down on his luck and a pretty, young waitress meet serendipitously in an old diner on the New York waterfront. Feeling sorry for him, she invites him to crash for a few days in her apartment. Two young people from opposite sides of the country, far away from home, are attracted to each other, which leads to an unlikely relationship with a retired, lonely Jewish widower living in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The old man, while helping a friend take inventory in his neighborhood hardware store, discovers a crate filled with old, discarded rusty nails and screws, which trigger a trove of terrible tragic memories. Together they embark on a voyage of discovery about a people and a history they never learned about in school. Eventually falling in love and the thought of marriage, Jimmy goes home to Texas to find the answer to a secret that has haunted him ever since he met Sam, the old man in whose house he finds refuge.
About the Author
Wolfgang I. Rauner (aka Johnny or Wolfie ) was born in Germany in 1928. He arrived in the US with his parents and three older siblings in June 1941 as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, first immigrating with his family to neighboring Luxembourg in 1935 and then escaping via France, Spain, and Portugal to the U.S. He first attended the public elementary school in Luxembourg and, after the German invasion of the Lowlands in May 1940, barred as a Jew, spent his last few months in a private school, hastily assembled by the local Jewish community. Settling in the Washington Heights section in Manhattan, then a popular haven for German Jewish refugees, he first attended New York City Public School 189, from which he graduated in 1944 and subsequently attended the School of Industrial Art, a New York City High School, where he studied commercial art, sign painting, and hand lettering. Not being able to attend college because of the family's limited resources, upon graduation, he worked for Sears Roebuck & Co. as a window designer and advertising director in a retail store, which was interrupted by two years in the US Army during the Korean War. He left Sears after returning to start a lifetime career in sales-first in the food business, followed by twenty years selling paints, the last thirty years as a successful manufacturers' representative in the arts and crafts industry. On retiring at age seventy-five, he began writing. Although not having any formal training in that art, he completed the memoirs of his youth: You Can Call Me Lucky. Inventory: Destiny and Redemption is his first novel and the culmination of a lifelong dream realized at the ripe age of eighty-six.
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