Israel Epstein - Journalism

Journalism

Israel Epstein began to work in journalism at age 15, when he wrote for the Peking and Tientsin Times, an English-language newspaper based in Tianjin. He also covered the Japanese Invasion of China for the United Press and other Western news agencies. In the autumn of 1938, he joined the China Defense League, which had been established by Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen's widow, for the purpose of publicizing and enlisting international support for the Chinese cause. In 1941, he faked news about his own death as a decoy for the Japanese who were trying to arrest him. The misinformation even found its way into a short item printed in the New York Times.

After being assigned to review one of the books of Edgar Snow, Israel Epstein and Snow came to know each other personally and Snow showed him his classic work Red Star Over China before it was published.

In 1934, Epstein married Edith Bihovsky Epstein, later Ballin, from whom he was divorced in the early 1940s. In 1944, Epstein first visited Britain and afterwards went to live in the United States with his second wife Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley for five years. During this time, he worked for Allied Labor News and published his book The Unfinished Revolution in China in 1947. His book was enthusiastically reviewed in The New York Times by the influential U.S. State Department adviser, Professor Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. In 1951 Communist defector Elizabeth Bentley testified to the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that "Israel Epstein had been a member of the Russian secret police for many years in China." Many years later, his wife, Ms. Cholmeley, would become known to a generation of Chinese language students in China and around the world as a contributor to one of the most widely used Chinese-English dictionaries published in the PRC. After Ms. Cholmeley's death in 1984, Israel Epstein married his third wife, Wan Bi.