An Everlasting Love Affair

This book, although it has been classified as an autobiography, is really a series of short stories that will leave you smiling. There are paragraphs in this book that are so candid and sometimes revealing, that my first reaction was... Lou, your wife is going to kill you for saying that in print!!! Lou's story about the Russian girls is just one of those stories and is very funny. Don't think for a minute that this is just another autobiography. Lou begins by telling of life growing up as a young boy in Lower Manhattan in the 1920's and 1930s. Times were tough in those years and you had to be resourceful to stay alive and help put food on the table. As Lou states, "Everyone was just trying to make ends meet ... lots of poverty and hard times." If you're looking for tales like those portrayed in the movie 2009 Gangs of New York, forget it this is more like the perseverance portrayed in the 1939 Streets of New York with Jackie Cooper. Lou goes on to tell of his efforts to get into the U.S. Army during WWII; he was kept at bay by his loving mother for a while and was finally inducted and sent to Europe to fight. It is here that he meets the love of his life, Irene, in a small German village. She was a beautiful young girl, he was young and thunderstruck by her beauty and gentleness.