Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl

Einstein’s Daughter is a fascinating and provocative investigation into the fate of the illegitimate daughter of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric: Lieserl, who was left in the care of her maternal grandparents and who mysteriously vanished at the age of eighteen months.

In 1902 an illegitimate daughter was born to Albert Einstein. In ’03 she vanished. The ’86 discovery of early love letters between Einstein & Mileva Maric, the woman who’d become his 1st wife, revealed the birth of a girl named Lieserl. After an ’03 letter, there’s no more mention of her. With nearly nine decades between the birth & our knowledge of it, with scant clues as to the course of her life, the fate of Lieserl Maric Einstein remained a mystery. In many respects, the story of Lieserl is inextricably linked to that of her mother, Mileva Maric, whose own story, as the author came to learn, was guarded for generations by her extended Serbian family, whose confidence Zackheim had to earn before they would part with family secrets. After five years of travel to Serbian villages wracked by years of strife, painstaking forays into the labyrinth of Central European record-keeping & hundreds of kitchen-table conversations; after following every lead, every flicker of intuition, & with the support of an international network of women, Zackheim has uncovered what became of Lieserl.

Bound to be controversial, Einstein’s Daughter is more than the story of its conclusion; it’s a story of the century–of fame & obscurity, love & betrayal, pretenders & protectors; of legends, lies, promises & unbearable truths.