5. May 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I am a writer.  I am also a tennis player.  (In fact, I have torn the ligaments in my right elbow playing tennis, and in lieu of having Tommy John surgery, I wear a wrist-to-shoulder metal  Bledsoe brace on my racquet arm which makes me look like the bionic woman.)  I frequently think about what the two have in common–like the need to learn the craft by taking lessons, then putting in hours of painstaking practice, until certain skills become automatic.  How many top- spin forehands have I hit in my life?  Too many to count.  And how many balls did I serve before the ball consistently hit the court in the proper box, let alone where I wanted it?  A googolplex, at least.  I started as a child.

But am I obsessed?  It seems that I am not, for when a tennis friend suggested that I write a novel about tennis, nothing resonated. “Anne Lamott has already done that,” I said, referring to Lamott’s book Crooked Little Heart, as if only one novel could be written on any subject.  It was an excuse lamer than my right arm, so how do I explain that a sport I’ve allowed to occupy so much time, for which I’ve risked and sustained significant injury, is not an obsession?

It leads me to think about subjects that do resonate.  A writer friend who sees my drafts before they are published noted that all my books have young women who figure prominently.  Another said, “Everything you write is about death.”  Yes.  Because the one thing I’ve never gotten over is the death of my sister, never mind she died before I was born.

So how do my current topics–my historical subjects–draw on that obsession?  Both the Darwin and the Einstein marriages and careers turn on a dead daughter.  It’s well-known that Charles Darwin’s faith deteriorated at the death of his daughter Annie.  But imagine my surprise when, well into my research for the novel, I first saw a photo of her gravestone.  Her name was Anne Elizabeth–my dead sister’s name, spelled exactly the same way.  The god of synchronicity was laughing.  No surprise then, that Henrietta Darwin, Annie’s next younger sister, has a point of view in the novel. There’s the obsession:  how death affects young women.

Why young women?  Because this is an area of my life where I continue to come of age as I explore what my sister’s death meant to my life.  I was the youngest child in my family, but my sister, being the oldest, left her place vacant.  I leap-frogged my brother, the middle child, and took over for her, becoming both the youngest and the oldest, carrying on my back a rag-picker’s bag full of ambiguity and identity confusion.   So yes, Henrietta Darwin is me.  And Emma Darwin is my mother.  And yes, my mother really did carry my dead sister’s body around at the wake.  I wasn’t born yet.  But in the few moments when the subject came up–the subject shrouded in a sacred silence in my household–mother described how she couldn’t let her baby go, how in the years that followed–years she was taking care of my brother and me, both babies, she had trouble covering us up at night when Anne was out in the rain.   I don’t remember the context of these revelations.  Perhaps it was the day I unearthed an unlabeled box in the hall closet.  Inside were my sister’s tiny pink bathrobe, matching slippers, and her well-worn Raggedy Ann doll, called DeeDee Ann.

All the best details come from real life.

Albert and Mileva Einstein also “lost” a daughter, but the fact was either unknown or obscured until their love letters surfaced in the closet of his oldest son’s wife, the person who cleaned out Mileva’s apartment in Zurich.   The little girl lived until she was two, at which time she contracted scarlet fever and likely died.  But the best efforts of scholars have not turned up documentation of her birth, baptism, or death–either because the shame of her being born prior to their marriage caused Mileva’s father to make certain records were destroyed, or because the records were destroyed in Serbia’s many wars.  My novel, as yet, is incomplete.  I’ve not yet written the passage where the baby is born.  But I know my identification with Mileva is so strong, it takes conscious effort to write Albert’s side of the story.

It takes this kind of obsession to sustain the work of writing a novel–the way the work gives back to the author.

What obsession is driving the work for you?

Posted in Zurich, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Einstein's Daughter, Charles Darwin, Annie Darwin, obsession, Einstein's children, point of view, Mileva Maric, Einstein, death, reading, historical fiction, Serbia, writing | 1 Comment »

20. March 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I will be teaching a workshop on writing the endings of short stories and novels at the Mad Anthony Writers’ Workshop April 13-15 in Hamilton, Ohio.  In the process of preparing, I was made conscious of subjects that generally remain unconscious as I’m first-drafting a novel; specifically, my point-of-view character’s inner conflict.  The inner conflict is that struggle by which a character prevents himself from getting what he desperately wants.  Sound counter-intuitive?  It is.  And yet we all sabotage ourselves for perfectly good reasons.  So do our characters.

Charles Darwin, the subject of my currently circulating novel, SANDWALK, provides a case in point.  Here was a man who desperately wanted to be a gentleman, as defined by 19th century Britain.  He was afraid to upset the status quo, and yet, his life work was to develop a theory that would challenge the very existence of God.  How did he deal with this?  He dawdled.  He spent twenty years on his research, writing directions to his wife to publish the material after his death.  What compelled him?  The death of his daughter, whose suffering led him to deny the possibility of a loving God.  It happened, when he received an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace describing a theory too like his, that he was faced with the necessity to publish immediately, or lose credit for his twenty years of work.  Ambition, specifically the need to prove himself to a father who predicted Darwin would never amount to anything, drove him to establish himself as co-author of a theory that would make him the target of 150 years of debate.  Some argue that this internal conflict was the cause of the sickness that made him an invalid for the productive years of his life.

And what of Albert Einstein?  A story was aired on “All Things Considered” last evening announcing the web publication of Einstein’s letters.  The letter read aloud on the air was one he wrote to his mother, Pauline, when she was terminally ill with stomach cancer in which Albert describes his sadness at the extremity of her suffering.  The fragment of the letter, considered by itself, would suggest Albert was a dutiful son who dearly loved his mother.  Not so!  In fact, she was the source of his greatest inner conflict, her demand that he conform to the bourgeois standards of middle class German Jewry in conflict with his desire to live a Bohemian lifestyle and marry Mileva Maric, the Serbian Orthodox Christian his mother despised.  The drama of his life played out in opposition to his mother, while, at the same time, he was unable ultimately to disobey her, finally leaving Mileva and marrying his cousin, Elsa, as was the common practice among the Jews of Germany.

How are inner conflicts resolved in fiction?  There are two choices:  The character realizes he is sabotaging himself and changes, or he fails to realize it.  The meaning of the ending is affected by this choice.

The techniques for delivering the choice will be covered in my workshop.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Charles Darwin, inner conflict, historical fiction, Pauline Einstein, Einstein, Mileva Maric, reading, writing | No Comments »

1. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

In keeping with my resolve not to change the historical record where it exists, I still wrestle with how to handle the gaps.   The writing of fictional biography gives me some license, of course, but I mostly interpret that to mean that I am imagining the scenes that are suggested by the historical record and making up the dialogue.  I’m also inventing characteristics and histories for minor characters who are documented in the record, but about whom little is written.  Mrs. Grut is an example, in my Darwin book.  She was the children’s  governess at a critical time in the Darwin household and appears in the Darwin letters but in no other place.  I knew she tried to make a proper Victorian household out of Emma Darwin’s fun house full of children–to the chagrin and detriment of all.  I had to create a character who was motivated to put things in order and provoke consternation.  Okay.  I’m fine with that.

What I find more troubling  is a matter like Mileva Maric’s sister Zorka, who was known to have developed something like schizophrenia.  What I don’t know is when it developed.  I can read statistics on when young women typically develop symptoms and I can read letters, but it seems that as soon as I write her into a scene with symptoms at an age of onset consistent with statistics, I read that Milos Maric (Mileva’s father) sent all his children abroad to school.  Now, how likely is it that an 18-year-old would thrive abroad at school with symptoms of schizophrenia?  I’m certain that Zorka was suffering symptoms by age 24, but then, after that, she went to help Mileva with the children during periods of Mileva’s debilitation after Einstein left the family. It doesn’t make sense to me that someone with unmedicated schizophrenia would be able to run a household with young children.

Perhaps the diagnosis is wrong.  Zorka was in Serbia and would have been hidden in the attic like Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre to avoid sending her to some brutal asylum where, at that time, she would have been chained to a wall or confined in some torture device and possibly put on public display like at Bedlam Hospital in England.  Zorka would not have been seen by a professional until later, when she went to Zurich and was treated at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, where the Einstein’s son Eduard, also schizophrenic, was interred at times.   So, there was a serious dysfunction of a psychological nature, which eventually Zorka self-medicated with alcohol, but it seemed to relapse at times.  One relative/neighbor interviewed by Michele Zackheim for her book Einstein’s Daughter said that before Mileva came home to visit her in later life, Zorka stopped drinking and put the house in order.   There’s volition, devotion, and shame in that behavior.  She knew she didn’t want Mileva to see how she was living.  Is that kind of self-awareness typical of schizophrenia?

There are two other bits of data that make me put age of onset sooner rather than later.  One is that when Mileva, already pregnant with Lieserl and still unmarried, traveled from Serbia to Switzerland to visit Albert in secret, he sent her a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel who was then the director of the Burgholzli.  Why that book?  While it is true that Mileva took a psychology course at some point in her education, they were not known to have read and discussed anything but physics together, so it seems out of context unless Mileva had requested he send her anything he could find to help her help Zorka.  He was in Schaffhausen, tutoring a young Englishman, and living in a household with a family.  Perhaps it was the only remotely relevant book he could find in a Schaffhausen library.

Conjecture.

The other data bit that makes me wonder about early onset for Zorka is that after Mileva’s baby was born, Albert and Mileva considered putting her up for adoption.  Why would they not have asked the Maric family to keep the baby?  She had already caused them shame by the fact of her unwed pregnancy.  They were wealthy and had servants, though Marija Maric (Mileva’s mother) continued to help with all house and farm work.  That means she was healthy.  The little girl lived there for 18 months, which seems a long time if she was going to be given up.  Perhaps Mileva’s parents couldn’t handle another dependent in addition to Zorka?

It’s all puzzling.  Then there is the fate of Lieserl–another unknown–except that Mileva clearly knows what happened to her and she’s a point-of-view character, so how do I get around that one?  I’m leaning heavily on Michele Zackheim’s interviews with family members and friends in Einstein’s Daughter, though I’m not certain how to explain a few things there, either.  For example, if Lieserl was born with Downs Syndrome–as Albert seems to have reported to a colleague later in his life–why would Albert have at the time written “I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.  It’s so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.”  To me, this sounds as though scarlet fever caused a disability she didn’t have before.  If Lieserl had died of the scarlet fever (lasting effect, indeed!), he would not have written the sentences that follow:  “As what is the child registered?  We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”

What is the likelihood that Lieserl was a Downs baby?  95% of Downs children are born to older mothers with no hereditary component.  Mileva was 25 at the time of conception.  The percentage of Downs children born due to other factors is 2-3% and then, only 1 in 3 due to a hereditary defect in one parent.  The fact that their third child was schizophrenic then, hardly seems to be related.

And, if Lieserl had been born a Downs baby, would Albert have been pleased when Mileva got pregnant a second time, after they were married? Even without a hereditary factor–likely not known at that time–wouldn’t the feelings be more complex at the thought of a second go-round?  But that same letter begins “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie [his nickname for Mileva] 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. . . .  Brood on it very carefully so that something good will come of it.”

So what can I conclude that will satisfy the parameters in this letter?  This is the primary source.

Posted in Michele Zackheim, Eduard Einstein, Zurich, Einstein's Daughter, Marija Maric, schizophrenia, Bulgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, Zorka Maric, Milos Maric, Auguste Forel, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Fictional biography, historical fiction, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, point of view, writing | 2 Comments »

26. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Bern is a medieval city that has changed little structurally since 1410 when a law was passed, after a fire that burned all the wooden buildings, that decreed all buildings be made of stone.   Of course the old city now has contemporary shops and is connected by buses and trams to the new city, yet still, it retains its original character.  The four main thoroughfares of the old city are covered in cobblestones and because the available stone, limestone, is porous, the eaves extend out farther than usual.  Awnings that originally covered the carts of vendors have been assimilated into the architecture so that the walkways are now covered, forming arcades on either side of the streets.

As you can see, the city remains much as it was, including a series of eleven fountains, each centered around a painted statue, where women in 1901 without running water assembled to do washing.

Bern is where Albert wrote the five papers that established his reputation in the year 1905, his anus mirabilus, while he was working full-time at the Bern Patent Office, newly married (1903) to Mileva, and soon-to-be the father of Hans Albert.  In his memoir, he records that these were the happy years.  (Interesting that happiness is reported BEFORE the success for which he is famous.  Hemingway also claimed the years before his acknowledgment, when married to Hadley Richardson, were his happiest.)

The apartment where Albert and Mileva lived when they were first married has been preserved as a tiny museum in two floors, those being what we would call the second and third floors.

You first enter two rooms of their apartment, one with a tiny fireplace and Albert’s desk from the Patent Office added, the other with table, chairs, grandfather clock, and photographs.  All are wood and quite beautiful.  The desk is the kind with cubbies, each filled with Albert’s belongings.

Between the two rooms in a little foyer is a closet with what appears to be Mileva’s wedding clothes and Hans Albert’s bassinet.  While it might be possible to look at period furniture dispassionately, the fabric of the clothing and the bassinet connected me to the real family.

Up the original staircase is a room full of information about Einstein, all of which was familiar to me from reading biographies.  It was my husband’s first initiation into the various particulars, so worthwhile for his participation and interest.  (No, I don’t discuss my day’s work with him beyond whether it went well or haltingly.  Though peculiarities in the research might come out, he doesn’t get the full gestalt until a trip such as this one or when reading the published book.)

The real treasure trove of content is in the Historical Museum here in Bern, housed in a castle and devoting an entire floor to Einstein.  With video demonstrations, newsreel, photographs and artifacts, the museum recreates the context of his work, his life, his legacy.

The Theory of Special Relativity is explained in animations, step-by-step, on four screens, the viewer able to rewatch each one as many times as necessary to understand the concepts.  This is the theory that presents the speed of light as the constant, and not space or time, as was previously thought.  As a writer, I’m struck with how much of grasping the concept is the same as understanding point of view.

The artifacts that were of greatest interest to me were those that demonstrated the particulars of daily life.  Seeing the heavy iron Mileva would have used, the telephone on which Albert might have called his mother, the stove that heated the rooms and old films of the trolley cars made the reality of their lives more palpable.

There were several rooms set up–a bedroom like where each lived in Zurich while in school, a store where Mileva might have shopped in Bern.  Such exhibits prevent me from imagining/writing their lives in a 21st century, revisionist way.

Three facts I didn’t know emerged:  Einstein’s father’s company was commissioned to light Oktoberfest with electricity–suggesting that Albert might have attended, especially the year it was first completed.  I can imagine the  moment of flipping that switch and seeing the grounds lit for the first time would be quite a sight.

I also learned that despite being aware that he was not a good marriage partner, Albert fell in love again in old age, after Elsa’s death, after his platonic relationship with his secretary Helen Dukas.  His inamorata was a Princeton librarian, Johanna Fantova, aka Hannie, also a European refugee.  He wrote her love poems like those he wrote to Mileva and liked to take her sailing–a lifelong passion akin to playing his violin.  Fortunately for Hannie, they didn’t marry.  He bemoaned in his memoir that he failed miserably at marriage.  Twice.

Finally, I saw the will above.  Mileva and Elsa were both dead before he died, so he provided $20,000 for his secretary, Helen Dukas, $20,000 for his step-daughter Margot (Elsa’s daughter), $15,000 for his son Eduard who was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution in Zurich, and $10,000 for his son Hans Albert, a hydro-geologist in California.  Any remainder, including all proceeds from his literary estate, was left to Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I will leave those numbers alone.  They speak for themselves.

Posted in Margot Einstein, Elsa Einstein, Helen Dukas, Johanna Fantova, Ernest Hemingway, History Museum, Hadley Richardson, Eduard Einstein, Hans Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, Switzerland, Mileva Maric, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Oktoberfest, Anus Mirabilus, Bern, Einstein | No Comments »

18. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

We stayed in Tremezzo (tree-metzo) because it’s the location of the Villa Carlotta, an open-to-the-public villa with extensive gardens that Albert and Mileva visited on their ferry trip from Como to Colico.  It’s likely they stopped in other villages as well–so we visited Bellagio and Varenna, both charming and different–but the Villa Carlotta is the stop that Mileva mentioned in her glowing letter to her friend Helene Savic, then married and living in Belgrade.

Built in the 1600’s for a powerful Milanese family, the Villa was bought in 1801 by an art collector responsible for its extant collection of Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Heyez.

In 1843, it was bought for the Princess Carlotta by her mother, the Prussian Princess Marianna of Nassau on the occasion of Carlotta’s marriage to Georg II of Sax-Meiningen, (note names for the villa’s ultimate fate) who was a passionate botanist and responsible for the 70,000 square meters of gardens, including rhododendron and azaleas that must have been astonishing when Albert and Mileva visited in May, as well as a cactus garden and a rain forest.

In the center rotunda of the villa stands a large-as-life sculpture of Mars and Venus in polished white marble, the figure of Mars standing stalwart, nude except for his helmet, sandals and a strap holding the cape that has fallen from his muscled body.  He holds a drawn sword, notable for its being the only metal part of the piece.  Venus, also nude, but round and supple, is the supplicant in the piece, as if begging Mars to reconsider.

In the next room, Eros and Psyche are caught mid-embrace, two beautiful, polished marble faces about to kiss in the lee of Eros’ spread wings.

It would be hard to imagine a more perfect set-up for the night Mileva got pregnant.  Unless it was the next night, after their drive in a horse-drawn sledge over the snow-covered Splugen Pass.  (When we crossed the Alps into Switzerland, there was no snow on the alps, though it was much colder than in Lake Como.)

I wonder if Mileva would have been so entranced had she known that after the birth of many children, the Princess Carlotta died at age 23, and that fewer than twenty years later the villa itself, on the defeat of Germany in WWI, would be confiscated by the Italian government.  Sad fate.

Beware of your affections, Mileva!

Posted in Bellagio, Varenna, Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo, Lake Como, Mileva Maric, reading, Einstein | No Comments »

15. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

My husband and I arrived in Milan yesterday after the (for me) sleepless overnight flight that is penance for the luxury of European travel, meaning no taxi fare seemed too high if it meant we might settle in at our hotel sooner. And Tremezzo, the small village on the west shore of Lake Como, midlake, where I had booked our room, couldn’t have made it more worth it. What overwhelmed me more than the lake itself, is the geography of the basin it’s in. Carved out by a glacier, the foothills surround the lake are covered in lush foliage with darker vertical veins, which in the haze of humidity appear velvetine, like the iris petals in the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe.

On the lake shore, the Hotel Villa Marie, complete with its own cupola (on left, below), is the most picturesque in a row of tile-roofed and pastel-painted Italian villas.

This is not where Albert and Mileva stayed, though it’s one km from the Villa Carlotta where they disembarked from their ferry to tour the house and gardens. The ferry boats are still the most efficient means of transportation to various villages on the lake, so today Beloved and I boarded the “slow boat,” (Centro Lago in Italian), and took a gestalt tour of the mid-lake villages, including Bellagio, home to luxury shops, and Varenna, a charmingly-preserved fishing village with an 11^th century stone chapel and unrestored 14^th century frescoes. Tomorrow we will tour the Villa Carlotta. Today it was focused on what it feels like to be here. This morning, in addition to the lapping of water against the stone walls that separate the land from the lake, I heard the church bells ring two strokes with a non-melodious “clong.” I heard the rigging of the sailboats clinking against aluminun masts in the tiny harbor in front of the hotel, but masts were wood in 1901, so perhaps chattering would be a better word. Regrettably, the traffic noise is loud now on the road that wends around the lake. Albert, unlike Beloved, would not have needed to jerk Mileva from the path of drivers speeding around blind curves.

At our sidewalk cafe dinner last night we sat at a small table among many other couples at small tables, all speaking in whispers, until, as invariable happens with my friendly husband, we all began talking to one another. Beside us was a couple of honeymooners, obvious and perfect for imagining Albert and Mileva, though they were not yet married on their May, 1901 trip, but their heads likely inclined toward one another in the same way, though Albert didn’t drink so they wouldn’t have shared the same bottle of expensive wine, (red, of course.) Still, they might have lingered long, ordering each course and eating it before deciding on the next, sharing each as if unable yet to acknowledge different preferences, she serving out his helping first while he sat by helpless and helplessly in love.

Around these two sat three couples of oldlyweds, none of us jaded, I hope, but clearly in a different place as we lounged back in the wicker chairs, drinking from different liters of wine—his red, hers white, ordering not multiple courses—who can eat like that after 35?–but trying not to lick the plate of our measley one course apiece. One man called the rising, almost-full moon, the sun and told the groom to enjoy the next six months as if life would never be like that again. Perhaps not, but I didn’t sense regret from any table. The most senior were a couple from Wales and England, clearly enjoying their holiday together, though they were supposed to come six months earlier for a wedding and had to postpone for his illness. I was thinking how Mileva would have envied us all—the young lovers and the mature ones with our children grown and ably fending for themselves–she who was abandoned and left to care for a schizophrenic son.

Now my patient Beloved waits, out on the balcony of our room, overlooking the lake. The rocky tops of the Alps to the north—in fact in Switzerland—turn pink at sunset. His wife writes on, but it is dinner time and he is getting hungry. I suspect we will return to our same cafe, The Helvetia, because our Welsh and British friends—last night the end of their holiday here–confirm it has the freshest food in Tremezzo.  The veal in mushrooms and wine the newlyweds were eating looked stupendous.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, historical fiction, Tremezzo, Bellagio, Varenna, Italy, Lake Como, Einstein, Mileva Maric, Research methods, reading, writing | 1 Comment »

18. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I have just uncovered that greatest of all delights, a book that runs so close to my vein that I look forward to going to bed at night so I can dip into it.  The book is The Paper Garden:  An Artist {Begins Her Life’s Work} At 72 by Molly Peacock. Perhaps it was my recent birthday that drew me to the book–one of the dreadful decade birthdays where it’s impossible not to glance back at goals unreached.  Anyway, the book turned up on my Amazon recommendations and given the title, I ran to the library.

The Paper Garden defies category, for while it presents a biographical portrait of the 18th century paper-cut artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788), it also contains memoir-like passages of the author’s journey of discovery and her reasons for attraction to the amazing flower collages which are reproduced (gorgeously, I might add) in the 2010 Bloomsbury Press publication.  Inspiration abounds to pursue whatever artistic passion consumes one, age notwithstanding, but what I find most riveting are poet Molly Peacock’s observations on making art.  (My novel, Shadow Dancing, (http://www.nancypinard.com/2.html) explored that subject, so it is dear and close, a subject I’ve tried to break down for my creative writing students into the bite-size pieces required when one embarks on eating any elephant.)

Listen to what Peacock says after noting how Mary Granville left unerased pencil marks on her cut-outs, as if unaware that anyone would ever view her work, let alone inspect her craft:

“Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet paradoxically, it’s proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passions, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten.  The joy of technique is the bulging bag of tricks it gives you to solve your dilemmas.  Craft gives you the tools for reparation.  And teachers give you craft, for a good teacher urges you beyond your childish perfectionism.  From there you proceed into the practice that eventually becomes expertise.”   (Peacock, p. 28-29)

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work–Isn’t the “childish perfectionism” what often causes me to be blocked?– the need for risk-taking in early drafts, before the slow, eventual process of plying and applying craft to remedy the problems.  I’m also thinking about Albert Einstein’s process and the question of the contribution made by Mileva Maric.

When I look at what the biographers report about how each of them managed their studies–Einstein able to dismiss the demands of academia and digest the newest thought (not being taught) at the Polytech in Zurich.  Maric, by contrast, was much more the disciplined partaker of academic demands–what normally is associated with being an A student.  She never missed class, did her reading and homework, took notes, attended labs, followed directions.  While Einstein got into trouble for “coloring outside the lines,” inventing his own protocol for lab experiments such that in Introductory Physics Lab he was flunked by Herr Professor Pernet, he was also teaching himself what worked and what didn’t.  He had disdain for repeating experiments and collecting data that had already been collected by someone else, saying “Nothing new comes of thinking about a problem the same way it was created.” In fact, he encouraged Maric to use data collected by others–a fact which annoyed Herr Professor Weber, as if Einstein was somehow advocating cheating.

Their particular, individual orientations toward problem-solving would seem to support the thesis that Einstein was in fact the person responsible for the theoretical leaps required to change the world’s thought.  Their son, Hans Albert, reported that his mother stayed up late at night, checking Albert’s work, re-working the math.  Where she scored a 9 to Albert’s 10 in theoretical physics, one might also imagine her usefulness as a sounding board for new ideas–that person who can see the notion, but possibly also the cracks.   Should she get credit for that?  Doesn’t it take both minds?

It would seem so , since the locus of Albert’s work was accomplished during their marriage.  Input from Michelle Besso, Marcel Grossman, and others continued after the marriage ended, but the revolutionary thought did not.

What conclusion do you draw?

Posted in The Paper Garden, Shadow Dancing, making art, Molly Peacock, reading, Einstein, Darwin, Mileva Maric, writing | 3 Comments »

23. June 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Most of what I knew about Jewish dowries, prior to researching the Einstein novel, came from the stories of Shalom Aleichem, via Tevye the milkman and Fiddler on the Roof.  I extend my gratitude and acknowledgment to Marion Kaplan and her book The Making of the Jewish Middle Class for furthering my education.

Some of Pauline Einstein’s objections to Albert’s love for Mileva Maric can be understood in terms of the German Jewish system of dowries.  The Jews of Imperial Germany, including the Einsteins, were predominantly middle class, interested in concentrating capital and creating economic and social alliances through marriages.  Not until after WW I, with the entrance of women into the workforce and inflation decimating middle-class savings, was the Jewish system of arranged marriages and parental control seriously challenged by the notion of companionate marriage.  At the time Albert and Mileva wanted to marry, 1901,  parental control via the dowry was the norm, among both Jews and members of the German bourgeoisie.  Those parents who chose to bow to the more popular romantic notions arranged situations for their children to meet appropriate partners, then denied that these marriages had been arranged.  The appropriate partners had, of course, been researched and a private investigator sometimes hired if the intended was not already known to the family by fortune and reputation.

Where Jews had for many years been limited by law to commerce and business, it makes particular sense that they would concern themselves with amalgamating finances and also tend to financial security where there was little security to be found for them elsewhere.  They also tended to marry within their group, by choice, but also by necessity given anti-Semitism. 

The dowry, which might include cash, real estate, jewels, and stocks, transferred property to the bride from her family at the time of her marriage. Its size indicated both social class and status, excluding those from lower ranks of society.  It bought security for women who were not educated and not expected to contribute to the economic prosperity of the new household.  While the woman might choose to invest her dowry in the husband’s business—as Pauline Einstein did, losing it to her husband’s poor business acumen—this was not required.  

The bride remained passive, sometimes ignorant of ongoing arrangements until she was informed that a young suitor would be coming to visit. The groom, particularly if he was older, might participate.  If the parties found one another agreeable, an engagement might be enacted on the spot, the financial arrangements having already been negotiated.

If a young woman’s parents were deceased, her brothers took charge of arranging her marriage.  Discharging this responsibility was regarded as a necessary moral prerequiste to their own marriages.

Familial, friendship, business and professional networks might be used to find appropriate partners, sometimes crossing national borders. 

Matchmakers were hired in the event a family had no appropriate connections.  The matchmakers specialized in a particular financial class and geography and worked for a percentage of the dowry. 

Advertising in local Jewish newspapers was an option for those who chose not to consult matchmakers.  The size of the dowry indicated the type of person sought.  For example 75,000 marks would attract a lawyer, doctor, or independent businessman, the price being adjusted to the locality.  A Berlin professional might command more.  A well-off shopkeeper with an income of 10,000 marks annually, would command a dowry of 30,000 marks.  20,000 marks would buy a mid-level civil servant—as Einstein eventually became when he was hired at the Patent Office in Bern.  5,000 marks got a woman a craftsman, and 2,000 bought her an elderly, well-situated gentleman, aka an old man.

In addition to bringing the dowry, there were certain qualifications for the woman, the primary one being her age.  After twenty-three a woman was no longer considered desirable.  Pauline Einstein was married at eighteen to the twenty-nine-year-old Hermann.  Albert, their oldest, was born four years later.  (Jews were the foremost practitioners of birth control in that era, Zurich, Switzerland being the center of that industry, 250 km from Albert’s birthplace in Ulm, Germany.)  Hence, when Pauline Einstein complained that Mileva was too old at twenty-five, it wasn’t only because Albert was four years younger. 

If a woman’s dowry was too small, she might be forced to move from the city (desirable) to the country (undesirable) to find a partner.  She might be forced to marry an older man, a widower with children, or an Eastern European Jew, all undesirable.  The worst fate a woman could suffer was to be mated to an American. 

What a strange twist history imposes, when Jewish women without dowries and sent to America, escaped the death camps in post-Imperial Germany. 

Posted in matchmakers, dowry, arranged marriage, Shalom Aleichem, Fiddler on the Roof, Switzerland, Marion Kaplan, Mileva Maric, Research methods, reading, Pauline Einstein, Einstein | No Comments »

8. June 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m working on a scene where it’s hard to understand Einstein’s behavior.  It’s mid-July, 1901, and Mileva is about to re-sit her exams at the Polytech, having failed them the summer before.  It’s her last chance to pass, and, oh-my-god, she’s pregnant now, with Einstein’s baby.  You might think he’d want to be there for her, to coach her through, to help her with geometry, a subject that eluded her, no thanks to a particularly obtuse professor in the subject.  Surely she would have appreciated his presence.  Whatever happens with the tests, she must head home to Serbia afterward, to tell her parents she’s going to have a baby. 

Did I mention the two aren’t married?

How do I make Einstein’s behavior something other than a dastardly abandonment, when instead of staying in Zurich, he’s off vacationing with his mother and sister in Mettmenstetten?  Yes, indeed.  He’s at a cushy hotel, the Pension-Paradies in the Alps!  

Fortunately, I have point-of-view on my side.  The important thing here is not to look at the big picture and see what he might have done, but to get inside his head and see how the prospect looked to him.  And I don’t mean the view from the hotel veranda.  Behind his eyes, I see that the greatest threat to Mileva’s well-being is not the exams or her father.  It’s his mother.  He’s off to do battle with the dragon.  I’m reminded of Grendal’s Dam and thinking I might need to re-read Beowulf.   s

Posted in Switzerland, Fictional biography, historical fiction, point of view, Mettmenstetten, Pauline Einstein, Einstein, family members, Mileva Maric, Serbia, writing | 3 Comments »

15. February 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Additional research–my thanks to Marion Kaplan for her book The Making of the Jewish Middle Class–reveals that as laws in Germany allowed Jews freedom to join the professions and become upwardly mobile, the German ideals of cleanliness entered the Jewish household.  They accepted the need for the clutterless household, regularly picked up and polished, as a way to bring security into an insecure existence.  Jewish housewives, it happens, came to be trend setters in terms of furnishings, as, thanks to having more relatives living in cities, they brought city styles and furniture arrangements to the outlying areas.

But here is a most revealing fact in terms of why Pauline Einstein, sight unseen, opposed Albert’s marriage to a Serb:

“Both Gentiles and Jews believed that dirt could lead to decadence, but for Jews it could also lead to the dreaded identification with their proletarian, Eastern, nonacculturated brothers and sisters living in the ghettos of Berlin and other major cities.  German Jews focused on eliminating dirt and smell—class symbols—from their lives.” (Kaplan, 33)

Anyone Eastern European threatened to bring down the standards of the household, those countries being associated with dirt and odor.  German households had a horror of garlic, that being the odor associated with Eastern European, nonacculturated Jews.   Imagine Albert’s mother, having a son who couldn’t be bothered to wash, comb his hair, or tie his shoes, now wanting to bring a Serb into the family!  (Land of gypsies and brigands, Serbia.  And Mileva’s father was proud of it.)  For a persecuted people group like the Jews, entering the middle class, acculturating with German Gentiles, was a way to avoid anti-Semitism.  

 And, I’m learning about my own family–that German grandmother, whose bedsheets were passed down to me, each with a little red thread in the exact center, so that when making the bed, one could center the sheets perfectly.  She was my mother’s mother, and so now I understand my mother’s horror of clutter–the need for bare kitchen counters, all appliances put away–and her dislike of garlic or any foods containing it.  Needless to say, she never made pasta–which we then called spaghetti.  (My dad loved it, but he had to eat it in a restaurant.)  I understand why cooking was no fun to mother–so much work, if one had to get out all the appliances, do the cooking, then expunge the evidence of the labor as soon as it was accomplished.  My mother was a bright, funny woman who couldn’t tolerate a mess.  I always felt this intolerance extinguished her creativity, not just in the kitchen, but in other aspects of her life, too.  Creativity is messy.  I can’t imagine being able to write a novel if I couldn’t stand the mess of structurelessness that  precedes a meaningful assemblage of pieces.

Posted in Pauline Einstein, Marion Kaplan, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Research methods, writing | No Comments »