Childhood
Rabbi Epstein was born in the town of Bakst, in the Vilna district of Lithuania, on the 20th of Adar, 5626 (1866), to Rabbi Tzvi Chaim and Baila Chana Epstein. His father, who served as the rabbi of Bakst, had been affectionately referred to during his days in the Volozhin yeshiva as "the Black Genius". Little Moshe Mordechai's genius was detected from a very early age. The child prodigy began studying in the Volozhin yeshiva at the age of 16, under the guidance of the legendary Torah giant Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik. There, he met his brother-in-law-to-be, Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, and, in 1889, married Menucha Frank, the eldest "Frank sister".
Read more about this topic: Moshe Mordechai Epstein
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Ah happy hills! ah pleasing shade!
Ah fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray’d,”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)