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M I C H E L E Z A C K H E I M
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Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl
|prepared by Aleksandra Janjic
 "On January 27, 1902, Mileva Maric secretly gave birth to a girl at her parent's 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 soon vanished into the Balkan night.
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 still be alive somewhere in Serbia, a wizened relic of the great relativist's youthful indiscretion?
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…
The result is a colorful glimpse of rural Serbian culture, with its patrimonial society, strong family loyalties, female subservience, slow, leisurely discourse.
Zackheim argues that toddler was severely retarded and probably had Down syndrome. She contends that Mileva, unable to place the little girl for adoption or bend her to an orphanage, left her with her parents at their home in Serbia's rural Vojvodina region on the fertile Danube plain.
The book has produced strong reactions, both positive and negative, in the academic community." 
Time Magazine
Check it out for yourself. This book is available at Amazon.com.
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