Jakubek Hirschfelt grew up in Wołyń (currently the border of Poland and Ukraine) at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a safe place for Jews; pogroms and marauding Cossacks were the order of the day. When Jakubek could not see a way out of the poverty and endless persecution of the Jews, he left his little shtetl for America. There he became Jake Deerfield, who married and had among others a very intelligent daughter called Victoria before he died in a mining accident.

Fact or Fiction: Unlike in Kairos’ Muses, the grandparents of the real Kairos’ wife (not parents) had similar backgrounds. According to Census Records, the Polish-Jewish grandfather came to a tiny mining community in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, where he worked in the mines and married a German-Jewish wife, who had eleven children of whom only six survived. Jakubek’s youth and meeting with Abraham Tuschinski (who was a real and quite famous person in Holland) is fictitious.

Site: “Shtetl” https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/shtetl

While Jakubek’s learned friend Symek Litwak with his brown eyes, straw-like hair, and glasses is nothing like this “Learned Jewish Man,” he is the embodiment of the learned man Jakubek and Symek aspire to be.

The Horowitzes from Vilna were the kind of people Jakubek Hischfelt might have met on the deck of the Holland-America Line. Jakubek himself slept below in steerage, yet everyone made sure to be on deck when the Statue of Liberty welcomed them to the USA.

Just like when Kairos sees the Statue of Liberty for the first time, Jakubek Hischfelt sees the statue as a kind of “muse” or “Lady Luck” before the realities of Ellis Island sink in. First, it seems like a floating island with little towers not unlike the ones back home…

…but then it turns out to be a holding pen where people wait endlessly, like cows at a market. Will it be worth it? Like for so many immigrants back then, if not for them, at least their children might have a better life.

And so it was for Jakubek Hirschfelt, who bravely turned himself into “Jake Deerfield,” miner and father to Victoria. Tall, intelligent, and more interested in medicine than in boys, Vicky was indeed victorious; even though she grew up in a little mining community in Pennsylvania, inspired by her mother’s loss of four out of the eleven children born, Vicky decided to become a gynecologist; in 1944, after a brief failed marriage, she was one of the first five women to graduate from Hahnemann Medical College (currently Drexel).

Coincidentally, the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania aka Hahnemann, initially a Homeopathic Medical College, became the first degree-granting medical school for women in the world.

Fact or Fiction: Although Vicky Winner is a pseudonym, she was indeed one out of the first five women to graduate from Hahnemann Medical College, but it was not her mother, but grandmother who had eleven children of whom only six survived. Victoria Winner (later Keizer) went on to have a sixty-some-year career in medicine, helping, saving, and mentoring hundreds of young women. At times, she even funded their education.