Word: mileva
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...excruciating period. His marriage to Mileva Maric, an intense and brooding Serbian physicist who had helped him with the math of his 1905 paper, had just exploded. She had left him in Berlin and moved to Zurich with their sons Hans Albert, 11, and Eduard, 5. Suffering from acute stomach pains exacerbated by the food shortages of World War I, he was being nursed by a first cousin, Elsa Einstein, whom he would eventually marry...
After 1915, Albert Einstein continued to rely on his good friend Heinrich Zangger, a professor of forensic medicine in Zurich, to serve as mediator between him and his estranged first wife, Mileva. These three letters to Zangger, published here for the first time, allow us to track Einstein's fitful relationship with his elder son, Hans Albert, and his anxiety about the health on his younger son, Eduard (Tete), whom historians believe was suffering from the early stages of schizophrenia...
...weighs heavily on my mind that you are being burdened this way by me. This awareness haunts me all day long. I beg you sincerely to discuss with my sister how she can relieve the burden which is not suited for your already so heavily burdened shoulders. Help Miza [Mileva, Einstein's first wife] gain the necessary confidence in my sister so that she can take Albert, as would be the obvious thing under the prevailing circumstances. Don't give Albert the booklet; he isn't mature enough for it yet. His interest in such things is still playful...
...have contact, mostly having to do with their sons. The elder, Hans Albert, would become a distinguished professor of hydraulics at the University of California, Berkeley (and, like his father, a passionate sailor). The younger, Eduard, gifted in music and literature, would die in a Swiss psychiatric hospital. Mileva helped support herself by tutoring in mathematics and physics. Despite speculation about her possible unacknowledged contributions to special relativity, she herself never made such claims...
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...