The Extraordinary Dr Epstein by Susan Lee Kerr

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Ephraim Epstein is an astonishing 19th century immigrant so bound to truth that he constantly reinvents himself, even at the cost of what he holds most dear. This is a true story told as a novel, using family tales, research and imagination. Starting on the fateful day he is told he must marry his cousin, this is the turbulent life of a brilliant, incorrigible man of conviction. Doctor, farmhand, missionary, ship’s surgeon, scholar, journalist, university founder, Jew and Christian, Russian and American, he spoke seven languages, had two wives, fathered ten children, one of whom died in a terrible tragedy… Ephraim’s uncompromising character drives him from Czarist Belarus to antebellum American, back across the Atlantic to Thessalonika and Vienna, then back again to the wild West. He lives an epic sweep across continents and history from 1850 into the 20th century. Author Susan Lee Kerr is the great granddaughter of Ephraim Epstein and grew up in the shadow of his genius.