Einstein's Lost Child

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Zackheim's case is intriguing if not entirely convincing. A feminist activist in the 1960s and early '70s, she says she decided to pursue the book when she discovered that Einstein, a great icon of her youth in Compton, Calif., had had a child he might have forsaken. "It fascinated me from a psychological point of view," she says. "How did his daughter feel about being abandoned, especially by somebody who was so important to the culture?"

Helped by small grants and loans, Zackheim set off on her five-year quest for Lieserl, crisscrossing Switzerland, Germany, England, Hungary and especially Serbia. Even while bombs burst, she visited Mileva's ancestral villages, seeking her kin or anyone close to her family, including Serbian Orthodox priests and nuns, and holding many hours of coffee-table conversation, to say nothing of rummaging through countless baptismal records and archives for key documents. Many of them turned out to have been lost in the endless Balkan wars; others relating directly to little Lieserl may have been destroyed by Mileva's protective father.

The result is a colorful glimpse of rural Serbian culture, with its patrimonial society, strong family loyalties, female subservience, slow, leisurely discourse. Zackheim does manage to eliminate a number of women as possible Lieserls, including a melodramatic Berlin actress who claimed in the 1930s to be Einstein's daughter. Zackheim's final conclusions, however--based on little more than inferences from a cryptic 1903 letter from Einstein to Mileva ("I am very sorry about what has happened to Lieserl. Scarlet fever often leaves some lasting trace behind") and vague comments about idiocy in the family by an elderly Maric descendant in the Serbian town of Kac--remain conjectural at best.

The book has produced strong reactions, both positive and negative, in the academic community. "It sounds reasonable," says the University of Louisiana's Lewis Pyenson, author of The Young Einstein (1985), of Zackheim's theory. "I'd like to see what evidence has been dug up to support it." But Boston University historian Robert Schulmann, director of the Einstein Papers Project, is much less impressed. He concedes that Zackheim's conclusions about Lieserl's fate are "as good as anything I could come up with, or anyone else. But," he emphasizes, "it's speculation." Harvard physicist and Einstein historian Gerald Holton is highly critical. "She worked very hard traipsing through all those Serbian cemeteries," he says of Zackheim's prodigious research effort, "and came up with nothing."

Zackheim will be adding, however, to the popular re-evaluation of Einstein that is slowly catching up with the scholarly revelations. Knowing Lieserl's fate, of course, doesn't make much difference when it comes to Einstein's science. But, like Zackheim, most people are slowly discovering that Einstein was not simply the secular saint they grew up with--the aureole-haired, sock-shunning professor who solved geometry problems for little girls, alerted F.D.R. to the German A-bomb peril and then wept over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.