Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl [Hardcover]

Michele Zackheim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 1999

A thoroughly gripping--and groundbreaking--investigation into the mysterious fate of Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter.

Albert Einstein fell in love with Mileva Maric, the woman who would become his first wife, when they were students at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute. When Maric conceived a child out of wedlock, she went home to her family in Serbia to have the child. Lieserl Maric Einstein was born in 1902.

Though Einstein and Maric married the following year, Lieserl was left in the care of her grandparents and never became a part of the Einstein family. In fact, her very existence was unknown until the recent discovery of a cache of letters between Einstein and Maric. The final reference to Lieserl comes in a September 1903 letter, when, at the age of approximately eighteen months, she simply disappears.

What happened to Einstein's daughter is the most potent mystery to emerge from the mythology that surrounds one of the century's legendary figures, owing in large part to the careful and apparently deliberate manner in which her existence was erased. Countless scholars and biographers have been unable to penetrate the mystery, until now.

After five years of travel to Serbian villages wracked by years of strife, painstaking forays into the labyrinth of Central European record-keeping, and hundreds of kitchen-table conversations; after following every lead and every flicker of intuition, and with the support of an international network of women,

Bound to be controversial, stunningly dramatic, Einstein's Daughter includes newly discovered primary-source material and is certain to make headlines of its own. Michele Zackheim has conclusively answered the question of what became of Lieserl Maric Einstein.

illustrated with 16 pages of black-and-white photos

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Albert Einstein met Mileva Mari at Zurich's Polytechnikum, where they were both physics students. Shortly thereafter, in 1902, she secretly gave birth to their daughter, Lieserl, at her parents' home in a small Serbian village. Although the couple married a year later (and divorced in 1919), they never publicly acknowledged their first child--and, in all probability, the girl never left the country of her birth. In order to uncover Lieserl's fate, author Michele Zackheim knew she had to gain access to the fiercely proud and private Serbian kin who sheltered Mileva after the baby's birth until she rejoined Albert in Switzerland in 1903, and presumably never saw her daughter again. Zackheim's narrative, studded with Serbian proverbs and accounts of elaborately polite fencing with elderly relatives who might just know something, offers a vivid glimpse of a rural life that has changed little in the nearly 100 years since Mileva's time. It's also a cat-and-mouse tale of missing documents, letters with sentences obliterated or pages destroyed, and four women who might have been Lieserl... but weren't. The author's final conclusion about Lieserl's fate is speculative, to put it mildly, and most Einstein scholars have questioned it. Einstein's Daughter is best enjoyed as a memoir of scholarly detection and a colorful social history rather than a conventional biography. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

In 1986, Albert Einstein's granddaughter discovered a cache of love letters by the physicist and Mileva Maric, the Serbian woman who became his first wife. The letters disclosed that the couple had a daughter named Lieserl, born in 1902, a year before they married, but all traces of this infant daughterAhitherto unknown to biographersAdisappear after 1903. What became of Lieserl? Scholars have assumed that she was put up for adoption, but Zackheim, who went to Serbia and Germany to comb archives and to interview the Einsteins' surviving relatives, neighbors and associates, believes that Lieserl was born with a severe mental handicap and died of scarlet fever in infancy. Her thesis is intriguing but inconclusive, based on only a few witnesses' recollections. Writing elegantly, Zackheim does establish that Lieserl lived with Mileva's parents, and her remarkable sleuthing turns up new details of Einstein's personal life. In her withering, one-sided portrait, the great physicist, pacifist, freethinker and internationalist was a dictatorial, insulting, selfish, unfaithful spouse, a curmudgeon with a misanthropic streak. Einstein, by this account, emotionally abused his ailing first wife and virtually abandoned their two young sons after he divorced Mileva in 1919 so that he could marry his cousin Elsa five months later. Zackheim paints Einstein's second marriage as one of mere convenience, portraying him as a cold, distant mate, "a middle-aged Lothario" who "tended to have a few romances going at once." She also speculates, without evidence, that Einstein may have infected Mileva with syphilis, and that she could have passed it to Lieserl in utero, increasing the risk of mental retardation. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 301 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1ST edition (October 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221279
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221276
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,125,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A thesis on conjecture, August 8, 2001

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Paperback)

Albert and Mileva Einstein had premarital sex and as a result, Mileva got pregnant. She had a girl, born in 1902. This was considered a big disgrace in those days in her country, and little is known about the child and her fate. The author sets to find out what happened to Lieserl. This book is easy to read, in general, although the abundant number of people interviewed makes it a bit confusing at times. Fortunately, the author did not forget to include a genealogical tree in the first few pages, to which i referred constantly.

Just a few points:

· The author stretches facts quite a bit. For example, on page 175, Einstein is supposed to have written to his ex-wife: "But the heredity of our own children is not without blemish", and the author affirms that Einstein "was ostensibly including Lieserl". Really? People speak like this all the time and are not necessarily referring to a love child. The front cover photo is another example. Zackheim says, "This may be the only existing image of Lieserl", and the blur she is referring to can also pass as a goat, a fence post or a dahlia. There are many other examples of these might-or-might-not situations, and the problem is that the author draws too many conclusions from them.

· While i was reading this book I could not help but think that her research did not differ all that much from what journalists do when writing an exposé on a modern day celebrity. They usually do not have to travel to Central Europe to do so, and do not get financial support from the NEA, but in substance they do the same job. Zackheim speculates whether Einstein and Mileva had sex after their divorce, whether Einstein's syphilis is what caused his children's ailments and all this speculation becomes slightly sordid after a while.

· When Woody Allen became tabloid fodder a few years ago, i was very disappointed. I like what he creates but do not like him as a person. Same thing with Einstein after reading this book. He was a genius who revolutionized the way we do science today, but as a human being he was a self-centered, tyrannical, arrogant, miserly,...(and you can add your own list of pejorative adjectives here). If only half of what Zackheim says is true, he was truly evil, especially to his children.

· Zackheim spent a lot of time in Serbia, and her accounts about the war and the difficulties she observed are some of the best writing in the book. However, she writes about Serbs as an American (and who can blame her? that's what she is). There is a slight condescending tone whenever she refers to Serbian culture, especially more blatant when talking about any of the male relatives of Mileva (alive and interviewed by her, or long dead).

In summary, this is a passable book about an unsolved mystery. It is entertaining, fast, provides some good information on life in Central Europe from the late 1800's to present, but when you get to the back cover it leaves you dissatisfied. Ultimately, it did not deliver.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Futile Search for Einstein's Daughter, December 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Paperback)

This book was a fascinating read .... Other problems: The book bogged down in names and is hindered by a lack of an index. So when my head was swimming with names, I couldn't check the book's first mention of that person to be reminded who it was. Zackheim was repeatedly careless with pronouns, so a "she" or "her" in a sentence could refer to more than one woman.

Zackheim speculated too much, such as who knew whom, and what motivated people. She speculated on small things, such as whether Einstein and his ex-wife resumed sexual relations. She speculated on big things - such as what happened to Lieserl.

I was originally engrossed in the book. I dreamed about it one night, and the next day, I had to read the last 100 pages to find out what happened to Lieserl. Zackheim doesn't know. I felt let down.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative, September 9, 2003

By 

Reader (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Paperback)

The author put five years of her life into writing this book, and it shows. This is a thoroughly researched book about a little-known event that happened 100 years ago. The conclusion is, of course, speculative but entirely convincing. What is even more revealing is what she tells us about the character of Einstein. For this information she draws on her extensive bibliography. She didn't make any of it up. The quotations are from letters that Einstein wrote. He was a philandering cad who cared for nobody around him. I would not have liked to be related to him in any way. In addition, the letters indicate that Mileva may have played a significant role in his work of 1902-1906. So much for the myth of Einstein, genius, humanitarian, etc.