When Princeton's most famous resident, Albert Einstein, was away from his home on Mercer Street, he wrote almost daily letters to his second wife Elsa and to her daughter Margot. He wrote about listening to boring lectures, and about delivering them. He wrote about playing music with friends, and about his efforts to give up smoking.
It's hard to imagine the world's most famous physicist without his signature pipe.
Einstein's letters home are among a batch that have just come into the public domain, unsealed on July 10 in Jerusalem after being kept closed for the last 20 years at the behest of his stepdaughter, Margot Einstein, who willed them to the Hebrew University with the stipulation that they remain sealed for twenty years after her death, which occured in July 1986.
Earlier, upon his death in 1955 at the age of 76, Einstein's personal papers and literary estate had been bequeathed to the Hebrew University that he had helped found.
According to a news release from the university, the newly unsealed letters are part of a large collection of correspondence that was opened and made public by the Albert Einstein Archives there and should shed further light on Einstein's private life, filling in details to create a "higher resolution" image of the scientist.
Most of the letters were written to his second wife Elsa, a cousin, to whom he became romantically attached in 1912 when he was still married to his first wife, Mileva, a fellow scientist with whom he had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.
Many letters are from Mileva and their two sons. While they reveal intimate details of Einstein's life, they bear little on his scientific achievements.
The almost 3,500 pages of correspondence covers the years between 1912 and 1955. The release suggests that the most striking aspect of the more than 1,300 newly released letters is the way in which his extramarital affairs are openly discussed with his wife Elsa and his stepdaughter Margot, with whom he is quite candid about his wife's reluctant acceptance of the situation.
Among other liaisons, the letters document his falling in love, in 1923, with the young niece of a friend. The young woman had become Einstein's secretary, and he did his utmost to integrate her into his family life.
Between the mid-1920s and his emigration to the United States in 1933 to take up a leading position with the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study, there were other women in Einstein's personal life: a Margarete, an Estella, not one but two named Toni, and an Ethel, all of whom shared Einstein's company and the pleasures of sailing, reading books, and attending concerts.
References are made to women throughout his letters, often with the premise that they were chasing him and showering him with "unwanted" affection. In one letter to his stepdaughter, Margot, in 1931, Einstein confides, "It is true that Mrs. M. followed me [to England] and her chasing after me is getting out of control."
The letters clarify the fate of Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize money. A sum of about $28,000 then, it would be worth ten times as much in today's value. Despite reports that Einstein transferred the money directly to Switzerland following a divorce agreement in which it was assigned to his first wife, Mileva, these letters reveal that he invested the major part of it in the United States where much of it was lost during the Depression through bond investments on Wall Street.
Letters flesh out his relationship with his sons and with his stepdaughter, Margot. Particular attention is given to his relationship with his son, Eduard, whose schizophrenia he had difficulty in accepting.
Writing to his wife Elsa in 1924, he said, "I love her [Margot] as much as if she were my own daughter, perhaps even more so, since who knows what kind of brat she would have become [had I fathered her]."
The letters also reveal private feelings regarding his famous theory of relativity. Writing to Elsa in 1921, he said, "Soon I'll be fed up with the relativity. Even such a thing fades away when one is too involved with it."
The new material is available for study at the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University, where the letters have been read and indexed by archivist Barbara Wolff, who observed that they add color to the picture we already had of Einstein.
Some of the new material will be included in the 10th volume of the Einstein Archive, published by Princeton University Press and edited by the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.
According to the press release, translations of letters, images and background information are available on request from Rebecca Zeffert, Dept. of Media Relations, the Hebrew University. For more information, visit http://media.huji.ac.il.