Word: serbians
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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...
...result is a colorful glimpse of rural Serbian culture, with its patrimonial society, strong family loyalties, female subservience, 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...
...less impressed. He concedes that Zackheim's conclusions about Lieserl's fate are "as good as anything I could come up with, or anyone else. But," he emphasizes, "it's speculation." Harvard physicist and Einstein historian Gerald Holton is highly critical. "She worked very hard traipsing through all those Serbian cemeteries," he says of Zackheim's prodigious research effort, "and came up with nothing...
Yesterday, the London Guardian reported that four Serbian children died and two more were seriously injured in Mogila when a bomblet they had discovered detonated...
...wrecks, not the finish. Last week Holbrooke jetted into Kosovo to try to jump-start a U.N. relief effort in danger of deteriorating. "The future of the United Nations is being tested here," Holbrooke said as he bounced along the road to Cikatovo, a Kosovar village where Serbian forces executed at least 100 ethnic Albanians and pushed their bodies over a cliff. "We have to remember why we're here," Holbrooke said as he looked at the gravesite...