November 28, 1999

By SARA IVRY

EINSTEIN'S DAUGHTER

The Search for Lieserl

By Michele Zackheim.

Riverhead, $26.95.



he fate of Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter has been shrouded since her existence was established in 1986, though the prevailing belief holds that Lieserl was put up for adoption as a baby. In ''Einstein's Daughter,'' the novelist Michele Zackheim contends instead that Lieserl died young from complications related to scarlet fever. Zackheim lumbers toward this plausible and decidedly anticlimactic conclusion in a poorly organized, highly speculative and somewhat self-righteous account of Lieserl's life and death. In 1995, Zackheim traveled to Europe, inspired by the remote possibility that Lieserl might still be alive. She researched the life of the Serb Mileva Maric, Einstein's first wife and Lieserl's mother, who gave birth before she and Einstein married. After interviewing friends and relatives of Maric and Einstein, Zackheim had found the names of four women who might have been Lieserl. Unfortunately, her labored elimination of each candidate seems altogether hollow, as if Zackheim were compensating for a lack of material about Lieserl with too much information on other matters, often interesting but arguably tangential. Her precise and slightly voyeuristic account of the Einstein-Maric relationship is the strongest part of the book, giving a portrait, familiar by now, of Einstein as an unsentimental, cold philanderer and suggesting that he suffered from syphilis and fathered an illegitimate son who lives in Prague. Zackheim describes Maric as a sad, brooding woman who sacrificed her own promising career for her children and ungrateful husband. Zackheim's romanticized view of Balkan history, society and people, rife with generalizations and trite Serbian adages, is distracting.

