Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl Book

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 Read More

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  • Product Description

    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

  • 1573221279
  • 9781573221276
  • Michele Zackheim
  • 1 October 1999
  • Riverhead Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 301
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