9. October 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

At the time of this letter, Mileva Maric-Einstein (nicknamed Dollie to his Johnnie) is newly pregnant with her second child and in Budapest, likely to deal with something about Lieserl, the illegitimate daughter born to the two.  Considering the marriage would have legitimized this child, it’s not clear why the child wasn’t taken into their household.  Perhaps Einstein was afraid it would disrupt his newly-acquired position in the conservative moral climate of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.  Or was it something to do with the after-effects of scarlet fever?  This letter is the last-known mention of Lieserl.  I find the last three sentences particularly ominous.  Scholars only guess at what they mean.  The source I read today, Andrea Gabor’s book Einstein’s Wife, (p. 19) suggests that the two may have decided to put her up for adoption.  Einstein’s inability to come alongside her, his admonition not to worry about it, to come back content and have another Lieserl, seems callous.  Here’s the letter:

“I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie is hatching a new chick.  In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl.  After all, you shouldn’t be denied that which is the right of all women.  Don’t worry about it, and come back content.  I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.  It’s so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.  If only this will pass.  As what is the child registered?  We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”  (Quoted from Renn and Schulmann, eds. Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric:  The Love Letters, p. 78.)

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17. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

No, Einstein was not schizophrenic. But his son, Eduard was. And Mileva’s sister. I have media-inspired notions of schizophrenia, such as from the movie A Beautiful Mind, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but wasn’t sure how a visual medium like film might have necessarily distorted what it really is. L. Fuller Torrey’s book, Surviving Schizophrenia, makes for interesting bedtime reading.

I like this book for its clear explanations and its use of literature (stories by Poe and Chekov) and fine art (paintings by Henri Rousseau and Edvard Munch) to render the experience of life from inside the mind of a person beset with a schizophrenic episode. Schizophrenia is typified by a heightening of the senses and a malfunction of the brain’s limbic system to adequately screen out the irrelevant input. Think of the heightened sense of hearing in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Other senses may also be overstimulated simultaneously, which, with no filtering, is an overwhelming experience. For this reason, schizophrenics cannot follow television–a misnomer presented by the media where we often see patients in a ward staring at the television. Heightened and non-discerning sensory input seems to be the one distinguishing characteristic of the disease and the one most frequently experienced at onset–typically in late adolescence.

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8. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

Everyone is familiar with the iconic pictures of Einstein as an old man. He has a wild halo of white hair and looks somewhat mad.
As with Darwin, whose iconic photo also shows him as old, bearded, and white-haired, I wonder if such images are intended to replace God in the minds of viewers–as an adjunct to the never-ending debate between science and faith.

More interesting to me are the photographs of the younger Einsteins, the ones we haven’t seen until they have become cliches.

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26. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

Despite having the highest grades in his graduating class at the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein was unable to find a job after graduation.  It was understood that such a student would become the assistant to one of the professors there, but thanks to Einstein’s having failed to attend class and an impudence that  came off as arrogant, even the professors who had originally recognized and reveled in his peculiar genius refused to hire him.  Eventually he suspected them of sabotaging his efforts to get work elsewhere.  At last his friend Grossman was able to secure him a position in the patent office in Bern.  He abandoned a student he had been tutoring and moved to Bern in January 1902.  (Is this a pattern?)

Meanwhile, his relationship with a Serbian classmate, Mileva Maric, a woman nearly his equal in her passion for physics, had grown to the point of sexual intimacy.  She became pregnant and returned to her home in Novi Sad, to her family, to wait out the pregnancy.  The child, Lieserl, remained unknown to Einstein scholars until the publication of letters found in the safety deposit box of Einstein’s son, Hans Albert’s second wife.  Hans’ first wife had cleaned out Mileva Maric’s Zurich apartment on her death in 1948.  Voila. 

Mileva eventually became Einstein’s wife and they had two sons together, both recognized, but this little girl Lieserl–?  She was delivered at Mileva’s parents’ home in Novi Sad—a labor so difficult that she was unable to write to Einstein, so her father notified him.

 
“Is she healthy, and does she cry properly?” Einstein wrote back.  What are her eyes like?  Which one of us does she more resemble?  Who is giving her milk?  Is she hungry?  She must be completely bald.  I love her so much and don’t even know her yet?”  Yet this love did not inspire him to make the train trip to visit her, and when Mileva turned up later to be married, she did not bring Lieserl.  No one knew of this baby’s existence until the letters turned up in 1986. 

What became of the baby?  This remains a mystery, despite the efforts of Michele Zackheim, author of Einstein’s Daughter, a memoir Zackheim’s journey to uncover her whereabouts.  Several theories seem likely.  Lieserl may have been sent to Maric’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savic, who had lived in the same rooming house in Zurich.  A Viennese Jew, Savic married an engineer from Serbia and Mileva encouraged Einstein to write to her occasionally.  “We must treat her very nicely.  She’ll have to help us in something important, after all.”  (Isaacson, p. 77)  Whether this “adoption” ever took place was impossible for Zackheim to determine, thanks to poorly kept records of births and baptisms complicated by wars destroying the records that were kept.   One theory suggests that Lieserl was a monstrosity and hidden away at Maric’s parents’ farm.  Another that she died at two-years-old, of scarlet fever.  Whatever happened, she seems to have vanished to history. 

So, what to do with this?  If the story frames itself later in the life of the principals, these could be flashbacks.  Or, I can imagine the scene told from Maric’s father’s POV.  The Maric parents had received a hostile letter from Einstein’s mother, as she opposed the marriage.  Imagine receiving a letter  from the mother of your daughter’s fiance, deriding your daughter?  What would become of that letter when your daughter turned up at home, pregnant with a child whose father couldn’t be bothered to come visit?  This would involve researching Maric’s parents—Serbs who were somewhat wealthy by the standard of the day and region—wealthy enough to send their brilliant daughter to college in an era when women were not educated.  Mileva was the only woman in Einstein’s class. 

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9. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

Today I read an article on Einstein that might provide a possible frame for the next book.  I’m not far enough in to say for certain, but the article presents a possibility.   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594-7,00.html

The materials seem to be there, in print, translated and available, for me to do this without learning Hebrew and moving to Jerusalem to live in a library.  My fear is that the conflict–the race against a competitor to produce the theory–is too like Darwin’s threat from Alfred Russel Wallace.  The question becomes, is this kind of competition what makes scientists commit their notions to print?  Of course, the divorce scenerio and Einstein’s first wife’s antagonism is very different from the Darwin marriage.  The pain of the his son, Hans Albert, in the article is very touching.  

POV might be the solution to the similarities.  Not sure.  I need to read more– to find the similarity and resonance with my own life with some character in this drama.  At some point I’ll have words in my head.  I haven’t given up on my interest in exploring the question of his abandoning the son who was mentally ill–on the grounds that genius has its own demands and minding the infirm is not one of them.  The second son, Tete in the article, was schizophrenic.  His first wife, Mileva, beggered herself to take care of him.  Einstein, by then, was married to his cousin, Elsa Einstein, but he never stepped in to help–after the original Nobel Prize money he gave Mileva in the divorce settlement–for which she had to wait something like 14 years.  He became very wealthy but never revisited his obligation to his ex-wife/son.   

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7. June 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

In 1912 Albert met Paul Ehrenfest, a physicist and teacher of compatible brilliance.  Five years later, Ehrenfest had a son named Vassik born with Downs Syndrome, who in 1932 was institutionalized.  By way of comfort, Albert told him, “Valuable individuals must not be sacrificed to hopeless things.”  This position was consistent with Albert’s refusal to marry Mileva when she was pregnant and then delivered Lieserl, called by some who knew the family secret a “monstrosity.”  When their second son was afflicted with manic-depression, Albert abandoned the family.

As despicable as I find his abandonment, it remains an unsettled issue for me, as when I consider the pastor in Florida’s pain over his severely autistic son whose disability affects the whole family in such drastic ways.  I remember mother once saying that my classmate Susan was spending all her resources on a disabled baby and denying privileges to her two children who were actually capable of benefiting.  I’m against disabled children being mainstreamed and allowed to consume inordinate amounts of teacher attention/energy, so that the easily-educable children are denied.  So how is this different from Einstein’s position, as despicable as I find it on the page?  I’m also aware that if I were in the situation with my own child, it would no longer remain an intellectual question.  Like Mileva, I would feel committed to see it through, though even she abandoned Lieserl to her parents’ farm and went to Bern to marry Albert.  Ultimately, however, she died a grim, resentful woman, having beggered her emotional and financial resources to a lost cause.  How does this relate to a phrase I’ve heard myself speak to women who have allowed caretaking for elderly or mentally-ill relatives to use them up?  I ask them, “How many disabled people is better than one?”  But I don’t think I mean for them to abandon their loved one.  Rather to tell them it’s good (not bad, as they’ve been made to feel) to enlist support services, even if it means moving the person from the home. 

This being an unsettled issue is likely a point in its favor, just as the open-endedness of my position on faith vs science in the Darwin book made it a discovery process.  It’s really a moral problem. 

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