On June 28, Harvy told stories to a fascinated audience at Cary Memorial Library about the first and second volumes of his memoir, Just Lassen to Me! He spoke to 35 family photos from his first two books, and the moral and ethical dilemmas that his family put him through.

Harvy’s told about how his father, Johnny, fought both sides of WWII, lost everything he had accumulated to the Soviet takeover of his country, and then he escaped the communists and immigrated to Canada with just $50 in his pocket. There Johnny made a resounding success of himself as a businessman in his adopted city of Montreal. Yet Johnny also hid assets in offshore havens because he was afraid the Quebec Separatists would take his money away as the Soviets had done in 1948 . Harvy was the only one in the family that Johnny trusted to know about his hidden money, and Harvy kept his father’s secret for 27 years.

Harvy also recounted stories about how his mother survived in Budapest during WWII. She and her immediate Jewish family hid with false Christian papers. They survived the holocaust and the bombing of Budapest, while more distant relatives were killed in Auschwitz or in Hungarian work camps. The misery of those war years were then replace with the misery of being left three times by her finagling and two-timing husband.

Harvy told about what it took to reconcile, repudiate and rectify the predicaments he was thrust into by his tumultuous immigrant family and survivor father.