Word: mileva
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...relocated to northern Italy after another of his father's business failures, he quit his prep school because of its militaristic bent, renounced his German citizenship and eventually entered the famed Zurich Polytechnic, Switzerland's M.I.T. There he fell in love with a classmate, a Serbian physics student named Mileva Maric. Afflicted with a limp and three years his senior, she was nonetheless a soul mate. He rhapsodized about physics and music with her, called her his Dolly and fathered her illegitimate child--a sickly girl who may have died in infancy or been given up for adoption. They married...
...handsome, irrepressible romantic in those years, he once had to apologize to the husband of an old flame after Mileva discovered Einstein's renewed correspondence with her. He later complained that Mileva's pathological jealousy was typical of women of such "uncommon ugliness." Perhaps remorseful about the lost child and distanced by his absorption with his work--his only real passion--and his growing fame, Mileva became increasingly unhappy. On the eve of World War I, she reluctantly accompanied Einstein to Berlin, the citadel of European physics, but found the atmosphere insufferable and soon returned to Zurich with their...
...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 her with her parents at their home in Serbia's rural Vojvodina region on the fertile Danube plain...
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...
...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...