Publisher's Synopsis
The story of Ralph Manheim is not simply the story of a man who was born into a family of enormous wealth, who lived a life of pure luxury into young adulthood, and who fell in love with a woman for whom he gave it all up. That is the stuff of love stories, of which this is one, but more than that, it is the story of a man whose footsteps in life were ordained by the Lord before the foundation of the world. Rarely do we realize just how carefully the Lord has crafted and guided our lives until long after we have stepped into the destiny He carved out for us before the beginning of Time, each day, no matter what it has brought, leading us into His perfect will. Ralph Manheim was born Ralph Monheit, an Orthodox Jew whose family emigrated from the great Austrian-Hungarian Empire during the mid-to-late 1800s. The family established its own imprint upon an America that was in the midst of the greatest influx of ethnic peoples from all parts of Europe, quickly amassing quite a fortune in this new land of opportunity, but not without great loss and heartbreak. The Italian immigration brought us the rise of the Cosa Nostra; the Jewish immigration brought us the rise of Murder, Incorporated; united, they brought us the rise of the National Crime Syndicate. The Monheit family found itself in the midst not only of a new life in a new country, having left behind family members in a country where the political climate was ever changing, but in the midst of one of the darkest times in American history, the era of mobsters and gangsters, racketeering, murder-for-hire, and anti-Semitism. It was in this tapestry of turbulence and yet privilege that Ralph Monheit spent his younger years, comfortable beyond description, the apparent heir to great fortune. And then came along the determining factor that changed the history of his family tree forever: a young Italian Catholic woman named Jean with whom he fell in love. Ralph knew that choosing Jean and Catholicism over an arranged marriage and the Orthodox Jewry of his family was certain "death"; the family would sit shiva and disown him forever. Not only did they sit shiva, they threatened to kill the young couple. In a moment of time, Ralph fell from untold riches to a mere eleven dollars in his pocket, but because he left it all behind to pursue the wooing of the Lord in his heart, the Lord honored and blessed him throughout his lifetime. It is beyond our grasp to understand how the Lord works out His will in our lives, but hopefully this story captures the wonder and the awe of it at work in Ralph's life.
