Ecstasy and Distress is a historical family saga and romance that spans several generations. The story unfolds as a Jewish immigrant family settles in the busy and growing city of Portland, Maine, in 1840. Here they find many hardships as they confront anti-Semitism, nativism, and adjustment difficulties as they gain acceptance as peddlers and shopkeepers. At that time Jewish men becoming physicians and lawyers parallels the women who faced the same derision in order to become doctors and lawyers as well.

The novel thus tells of Jewish marriages and intermarriages that continue to build the family tree. These characters are strong self-assured women and men who reject family dismay as they find love, joy and gain acceptance in their struggle for dignity and honor not only in their chosen professions but within the various families.

Praise received:

"Richard Shain Cohen's fifth novel, Ecstasy and Distress, stops at all the junctures in this long and winding road detailing the arrival of a European Jewish family, the Blumenthals, in Portland, Maine, in 1840. He artfully details the progression of six generations of its members through the ensuing decades culminating in the Second World War. We come to learn that in spite of a common denominator of trials and tribulations each family's narrative is trenchantly unique. What was it like to be Jewish in pre-Civil War America? Was upward mobility possible for such as these? Was the American dream a fabrication, or were there new pathways to social and economic mobility in this rugged and changeable milieu? The ever-present specter of discrimination had to be faced, dealt with, and history had to be encountered on its own terms in the swift-moving currents of a family's long and courageous journey. The author does a superb job of bringing the Blumenthals into modern focus as a living, breathing, loving, caring entity and a strong and determined family capable of plotting its course and absorbing life's blows while redefining its terms for those to follow."

- James T. Kenny, PhD, Author