Growing up, I always wanted to be an archaeologist. Admittedly, my notion of an archaeologist was a bit fanciful, greatly influenced by Indiana Jones. Still, the idea of unearthing long-forgotten secrets from the ground and astonishing the world with a fresh understanding of our past captivated me.
Even though I studied history and archaeology in college with the intention of fulfilling that dream, I got derailed. I took the safer path of law school and a decade practicing as a commercial litigator in New York City, but the unknown past still held its allure, particularly the hidden history of women. My interest became piqued when I learned that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, was a physicist herself, and that she had been married to him during his 1905 “miracle year” when he published four papers with his most ground-breaking theories. I couldn’t stop thinking about the role Mileva might have played in his life and work, and so I began digging.
THE OTHER EINSTEIN is the result of that excavation, one made challenging by the fact that, while a wealth of evidence existed about her famous scientist husband, very little in the way of artifacts remain about Mileva’s life. Sifting through the extant papers and remembrances and filling in the gaps with fiction and logic, I recreated the story of a woman who made an astonishing climb from Eastern Europe where it was illegal for women to attend high school to become one of the few female physics students at a European university, where she met Albert Einstein. Hers was a life that deserved to be uncovered. So I have become a different sort of archaeologist than the one of which I originally dreamed, a writer excavating women from the dusty corners of the past where they’d been buried or forgotten, building stories of their forgotten lives, and finding their places in history.
Even though I studied history and archaeology in college with the intention of fulfilling that dream, I got derailed. I took the safer path of law school and a decade practicing as a commercial litigator in New York City, but the unknown past still held its allure, particularly the hidden history of women. My interest became piqued when I learned that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, was a physicist herself, and that she had been married to him during his 1905 “miracle year” when he published four papers with his most ground-breaking theories. I couldn’t stop thinking about the role Mileva might have played in his life and work, and so I began digging.
THE OTHER EINSTEIN is the result of that excavation, one made challenging by the fact that, while a wealth of evidence existed about her famous scientist husband, very little in the way of artifacts remain about Mileva’s life. Sifting through the extant papers and remembrances and filling in the gaps with fiction and logic, I recreated the story of a woman who made an astonishing climb from Eastern Europe where it was illegal for women to attend high school to become one of the few female physics students at a European university, where she met Albert Einstein. Hers was a life that deserved to be uncovered. So I have become a different sort of archaeologist than the one of which I originally dreamed, a writer excavating women from the dusty corners of the past where they’d been buried or forgotten, building stories of their forgotten lives, and finding their places in history.
This is such an interesting interview. I really related to the comparison to an archaeologist, digging through the past to uncover the stories of women. It sounds a lot like what I do when I research my female ancestors!
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to reading this book.