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Exclusive: Untold Tales of Einstein (doc #89) einstein.com New York, NY - A new book, Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, speculates about what happened after Albert Einstein fathered an illegitimate child, Lieserl, with his future wife, Mileva Maric. Author Michele Zackheim argues that the toddler was severely retarded and probably had Down's Syndrome. Considered uneducable at the time, Zackheim contends that Mileva, unable to place Lieserl for adoption or send her to an orphanage, left her with her parents at their home in Serbia's Vojovodina region. After a bout with scarlet fever, the baby died at 21 months on Sept. 15, 1903. "I am very sorry about what has happened to Lieserl," wrote Einstein in a cryptic letter to Mileva. "Scarlet fever often leaves some lasting trace behind." "It fascinated me from the psychological point of view," Sachem tells TIME's Frederic Golden on why she first became interested in the subject and decided to find out what had happened to Einstein's daughter. "How did his daughter feel about being abandoned, especially by someone who was so important to the culture?" Zackheim researched the book for five years, traveling to war-torn Serbia to seek out ancestors and documents. "The result is a colorful glimpse of rural Serbian culture, with its patrimonial society, strong family loyalties, female subservience, slow, leisurely discourse," writes Golden.
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