Einstein's Lost Child

When Pauline Einstein learned that her beloved son Albert was consorting with a fellow physics student--one who was older, of another faith and from the backwaters of the Balkans--she was devastated. "If she gets a child, you'll be in a pretty mess," his mother warned him. But the 22-year-old Albert, as roguishly independent in his personal life as he would be in his science, brushed off Mutti's agitated words and continued the romance. On Jan. 27, 1902, nine months after an idyllic interlude at Lake Como, Albert's classmate--and future wife--Mileva Maric secretly gave birth to a girl at her parents' home back in Serbia. Neither Mileva nor Albert ever talked about her, even to close friends. Like some brief, fiery meteor, the baby named Lieserl (diminutive for Elisabeth) soon vanished into the Balkan night.

The illegitimate child in Einstein's past did not come to light until more than 30 years after his death, when the first volume of his collected papers finally appeared, in 1987. Still, a mystery remains. What happened to Lieserl? And after they married, why didn't the couple bring her back to Switzerland and legitimize her birth? Was she given up for adoption, as many scholars believe, because she might have endangered Einstein's new career as a patent-office examiner in Calvinist Bern? And might she even still be alive somewhere in Serbia, a wizened relic of the great relativist's youthful indiscretion?

Even after publication of seven more volumes of Einstein papers--and many more embarrassing revelations about his private life (his flirtations, his stormy divorce from Mileva, his possible dalliance with the daughter of the woman who would become his second wife, his estrangement from his two sons, one of whom was schizophrenic)--Lieserl's fate shadows the Einstein legend like some unsolved equation.

Now an amateur scholar is convinced that she has sleuthed some answers--ones that are not only surprising but also sure to touch off still more controversy among fractious Einstein historians. In a new book titled Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Riverhead Books; $25.95), Michele Zackheim, 58, a Greenwich Village painter turned writer, argues that the toddler was severely retarded and probably had Down syndrome. A simpleton child, in the language of the time, she would have been considered uneducable. Zackheim contends that Mileva, unable to place the little girl for adoption or send her to an orphanage, left her with her parents at their home in Serbia's rural Vojvodina region on the fertile Danube plain.

And there Lieserl's life was poignantly short. According to Zackheim, the little girl died at 21 months after a bout of scarlet fever. Zackheim even gives the date of her death--Sept. 15, 1903, when Vojvodina was darkened by a solar eclipse, the sort of celestial ballet between sun and moon that would later provide the world with the first proof of the correctness of Einstein's radical new ideas about time and space.