Let's call this the archived blog of my writing of the story of Ephraim M Epstein's life. It's not a full synopsis, and since posting I have discovered factual errors. So I am updating the full & correct synopsis on its own new page, keeping this record here and turning home page back into the story of writing the story. SLK 31 Dec 2013.
KEEPING UP WITH EPHRAIM M EPSTEIN (blog entry 14 April 2011)
Please click on Chapter Outline page to see how far we are on the journey through the true life of this remarkable man.
BACK IN THE U S OF A (blog entry 6 Oct 2011)
Writing continues, after summer and family took me over for a while. Great to be back at the grindstone. Click on Chapter Outline on right to see the latest additions. In essence, he has shed the wife, reconciled with the daughter and mother, witnessed the great battle and won the Emperor's prize for his poem on it... and now at last he has returned to America -- to the wild gateway to the West.
BLISS AND TRAGEDY (blog entry 11 March 2012)
Another fifty pages done, taking Ephraim from frontier Kansas to bustling Cincinnati in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Here -- at last! -- the 44-year-old Dr Epstein finds true love... in the best friend of his 24-year-old daughter. Before long daughter Sarah puts Ephraim in a moral bind when she asks him to say she was born Christian. Why would she do this, and why would he agree? Because a Russian nobleman has seen her photograph, fallen desperately in love and proposed marriage with this condition.
Countess Sarah, called Sister Sadie by Ephraim and Helena Epstein, sails for St Petersburg, leaving her father to his happiness. And happiness it is, sealed by the birth of a son, William. And then a daughter, Selda, and another! Frieda. Ephraim is at his peak, a flourishing practising physician, a preacher and a family man.
But this settled success is not to last -- the darling golden son dies, and Ephraim's own hand wrote the prescription that, misfilled, kills the boy. He blames himself and abjures medical practice. In the midst of his grief and depression the second Epstein child dies.
The Pursuit of Happiness section ends in darkness. Where once fiery passion drove Ephraim to seize new challenges now tragedy and necessity bring him -- in the next section -- to a new uprooting and the forging of a compelling new career.
A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS (blog entry 31 May 2012)
Where to go in 1878 when life is shattered? The only answer is the wild west... untamed Dakota Territory. I've just completed this 30 page section taking Ephraim Epstein through yet more astonishing adventures.
Following the tragic death of his two young children (in the previous section) Ephraim gives up medical practice, blaming himself for his son's death. He is rescued from depression when a chance to teach arises. His many languages and his theological studies bear fruit at Heidelberg College, Ohio. But not for long. Within a year his controversial views mean that -- once again -- he has to move on.
So it's off to Dakota Territory, with a 2-year-old and a pregnant wife in tow. No prairie sod hut for Ephraim, now he is the Reverend Epstein of the Baptist church in Yankton, the territorial capital. He and Helena are there for the devastating 1881 Great Flood of the Missouri. Within a year he is fired with another new passion: education. Campaigning avidly for the opening of the Territory's first university, by 1882 he is not only a founder, but the first President of the University of Dakota. This means another relocation: to Vermillion, where today's University of South Dakota still is.
At last Ephraim's life enjoys a perfect interlude. Everything comes together: his brilliant mind, his Hebrew, Greek, German, Russian, English, all his learning now put to use in the service of his love of setting minds alight, alongside the satisfaction and status of being founding president. What's more he and Helena are blessed with children: Frieda, Julia, Zelda, Leo and, in August 1884, my own grandmother, Naomi.
Can this last? Of course not. It is an era of high and very low dealings as railroads carve up the prairie and statehood approaches. 'Sectarian and political chicanery' (his own words) see that he is ousted. He is accused of financial irregularities and -- not for the first time in his life -- controversial religious views.
Where oh where will Ephraim go next, with his brilliance, his fireyness, and his wife and five children to support... after a short break now that the long lovely summer nights are upon us I shall return for the new, and ever renewing, life story of Ephraim M Epstein.
STILL FULL OF SAP (blog entry 19 March 2013)
It is 1885 and once again Ephraim is driven to seek a new life. Whether it was because of his challenging Biblical views, his enemies' financial accusations, territorial political leverage or his Jewish heritage, he has been ousted from his position as founding president of Dakota Territory's new university. The passionate, upright, 56-year-old professor and former physician now has five children to support with the help of his loyal wife Helena.
The rational move would be to return to the practice of medicine. But Ephraim is still deeply mourning the death of his first son seven years ago, still blaming himself for the mis-filled prescription. Medicine is not an option. Pride intact, he finds a professorship in yet another geographical setting: West Virginia.
En route east, the family stops with Helena's family, and Ephraim visits the graves of William and little Selda, once more trying to forgive himself. After the spare prairieland, Bethany, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, presents a warm welcome -- and a very reduced salary and living situation. They squeeze into a tiny, thinly built house and spend a miserable first winter racked with colds and pains. Fearful over the illness of his two toddlers Ephraim calls in a physician who uses a new form of medication: alkaloids. With a mind always hungry for new truths, Ephraim is convinced; this sounds like the future of medicine. But when the younger man wonders why he has chosen teaching over medicine, Ephraim clings to the safety he has chosen.
And indeed, Bethany College is safe and supportive, a place where he finds a new mentor and complete freedom for his independent Christianity, including his lectures, sermons and readings with on-the-spot Hebrew and Greek interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. He begins an ambitious new book, The Names of God. Despite their isolation in a tiny hill town and their diminished finances, life is good -- and blessed by the birth of a sixth child, George.
A second son, and perhaps progresses in medicine -- and possibly, for this vital man, boredom with his safe haven -- triggers a visionary change. To his surprise, Ephraim takes up medical practice again. Soon the family relocates, this time only one town away, to West Liberty, where Ephraim takes over a large house and country practice, and a seventh child, Ruth, is born. With miles of hilly roads to travel by horse and carriage in all weathers, it is not an easy life, and Ephraim's confidence builds slowly.
A chance reading of a medical journal introduces Ephraim to a new and safer way to give medicines, which becomes his last great cause. At his start, bleeding and purging were routine treatment but now, 1894, medical science is progressing by leaps and bounds, alas with many quacks, quirks and quarrels. Dosimetry, however, is an ethical, scientific truth, and in Ephraim's passion for it he meets the editor of the journal -- with repercussions to come.
The children grow and flourish, disturbing news comes from Sadie-Sarah in Russia, and in his country practice, Ephraim begins to feel the toll of West Virginia's misty, snowy, humid seasons. In 1898 Ephraim suffers an agonising health crisis at the age of 69, and struggles to resume the physical stress of his practice: bills press, five of the seven children still need education, food and clothing. He broods: how can he support them?
The answer comes unexpectedly. It means another upheaval of the household, this time to the thriving metropolis of Chicago. Ephraim, delighted and relieved, accepts the offer from the editor of the medical journal to become a permanent staff member. Dr Epstein is to be The Gleaner, with a regular column of interpretations of European medical texts, a new career that takes him well into the 20th century. His intelligence, his wisdom, his passion and his godliness find welcome to the end of his days.
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