A disappointing account of the illegitimate child conceived by Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Mari—, a daughter who disappeared from all records until the publication of her parents’ early love letters in 1986. In 1902, Mari—, not yet married to Einstein, gave birth to a daughter behind closed doors at her parents’ home in the Vojvodina (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). By the following year, all traces of the child had disappeared. Zackheim (Violette’s Embrace, 1996) set out to solve the mystery of Einstein’s “lost” daughter. In her view, the child, named Lieserl, was born with severe mental handicaps. For this reason, Mari— decided to leave the child with her parents rather then return with her to Bern. When Lieserl died of scarlet fever less than two years after her birth, the family covered up all traces of her existence and kept secret this painful chapter in their history. Zackheim has clearly poured herself into this project. She has searched archives, read books and articles, interviewed relatives and friends of Einstein and Mari——plus potential surviving Lieserls—and spent several years in Serbia in search of the lost child. The question she leaves unanswered is: Why should anyone share the author’s obvious passion for this mystery? What does it reveal to us that is new or noteworthy about Einstein or Mari—? If Zackheim has not succeeded in persuading her audience of the importance of her topic in the broader scope of Einstein scholarship, it is because her book imprudently tells more about Mileva Mari— than her husband. In addition, Zackheim has delved so deeply into Serbian folklore, customs, and traditions that she foists them on her subject. Readers do not benefit from Serbian sayings and words that repeatedly appear in mid-sentence in both Serbian and English. Nor does Zackheim present convincing evidence that Mari— herself was closely bound to the Serbian customs she so lovingly details. In this misguided account of the child’s story, Zackheim, playing sleuth, dwells on the details but leaves a void at the heart of the drama.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-127-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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