Word: elsas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Einstein, meanwhile, had taken up with a divorced cousin, Elsa, who jovially cooked and cared for him during the emotionally draining months when he made the intellectual leaps that finally resulted in general relativity. Unlike Mileva, she gave him personal space, and not just for science. As he became more widely known, ladies swarmed around him like moonlets circling a planet. These dalliances irritated Elsa, who eventually became his wife, but as she told a friend, a genius of her husband's kind could never be irreproachable in every respect...
...quit Germany when the Nazis came to power, Einstein accepted an appointment at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a scholarly retreat largely created around him. (Asked what he thought he should be paid, Einstein, a financial innocent, suggested $3,000 a year. The hardheaded Elsa got that upped to $16,000.) Though occupied with his lonely struggle to unify gravity and electromagnetism in a single mathematical framework, he watched Germany's saber rattling with alarm. Despite his earlier pacifism, he spoke in favor of military action against Hitler. Without fanfare, he helped scores of Jewish refugees...
...Americans had entered the scene, the party was mostly over. The "clothes horses" of the '80s "were known to blow $100,000 or more on a couture wardrobe on a single Paris trip." These trans-Atlantic pirates, in the era of fashion news programs like CNN's "Style with Elsa Klensch" became the final guard of a dying industry, and Agins argues that we (you, me and her) looked up to them until our trust was broken. Haute Couture had never resembled the reality of the upper-middle and middle classes; it had been a fantasy. But eventually, the fantasy...
...intrudes into this wartime idyll. Elsa is Jewish. She is the anonymous philanthropist who puts money in a trust for Luca, delivers passports with his help to a Jewish woman, and, after the war breaks out, pays to move her English acquaintances from a dingy barracks to a hotel. Lady Hester assumes that Mussolini, with whom she once had tea, is the one who is paying for their stay at the hotel...
...same time, Elsa manages to fall in love and she signs her property over to her lover. Without betraying the twists of plot that make this film such a pleasure to watch, I only mention in passing that her lover plans to give her up to the Gestapo so he can walk away with her fortune scot free. Her ultimate fate--and the resolution of the film--lies in the hands of the Englishwomen for whom she is both benefactor and object of snobbery...