Word: lieserl
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...