Einstein's daughter: the search for Lieserl

A thoroughly gripping and groundbreaking investigation into the mysterious fate of Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter. Albert Einstein fell in love with Mileva Maric, the woman who would become his first wife, when they were students at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute. When Maric conceived a child out of wedlock, she went home to her family in Serbia to have the child. Lieserl Maric Einstein was born in 1902. Though Einstein and Maric married the following year, Lieserl was left in the care of her grandparents and never became a part of the Einstein family. In fact, her very existence was unknown until the recent discovery of a cache of letters between Einstein and Maric. The final reference to Lieserl comes in a September 1903 letter, when, at the age of approximately eighteen months, she simply disappears. What happened to Einstein's daughter is the most potent mystery to emerge from the mythology that surrounds one of the century's legendary figures, owing in large part to the careful and apparently deliberate manner in which her existence was erased. Countless scholars and biographers have been unable to penetrate the mystery, until now. After five years of travel to Serbian villages wracked by years of strife, painstaking forays into the labyrinth of Central European record-keeping, and hundreds of kitchen-table conversations; after following every lead and every flicker of intuition, and with the support of an international network of women, Bound to be controversial, stunningly dramatic, Einstein's Daughter includes newly discovered primary-source material and is certain to make headlines of its own. Michele Zackheim has conclusively answered the question of what became of Lieserl Maric Einstein. illustrated with 16 pages of black-and-white photos