einstein

he read aloud to her. Sometimes the fare was heavy, such as the arguments of Ptolemy against Aristarchus’s opinion that the world rotates around
the sun. “I could not help thinking of certain arguments of present-day physicists: learned and subtle, but without insight,” he wrote Solovine about
that evening. Other times, the readings were lighter but perhaps just as revealing, such as the evenings he read from Don Quixote; he sometimes
compared his own quixotic parries against the prevailing windmills of science with that of the old knight with a ready lance. 34
When Maja died in June 1951, Einstein was grief-stricken. “I miss her more than can be imagined,” he wrote a friend. He sat on the back porch
of his Mercer Street home for hours, pale and tense, staring into space. When his stepdaughter Margot came to console him, he pointed to the sky
and said, as if reassuring himself, “Look into nature, and then you will understand it better.” 35
Margot had likewise left her husband, who responded by writing, as he had long wanted to, an unauthorized biography of Einstein. She
worshipped Einstein, and each year they grew closer. He found her presence charming. “When Margot speaks,” he said, “you see flowers
growing.” 36
His ability to engender and feel such affection belied his reputation for being emotionally distant. Both Maja and Margot preferred living with him
to living with their own husbands as they got older. He had been a difficult husband and father because he did not take well to any constricting
bonds, but he could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.
Einstein was human, and thus both good and flawed, and the greatest of his failings came in the realm of the personal. He had lifelong friends
who were devoted to him, and he had family members who doted on him, but there were also those few—Mileva and Eduard foremost among them
—whom he simply walled out when the relationship became too painful.
As for his colleagues, they saw his kindly side. He was gentle and generous with partners and subordinates, both those who agreed with him and
those who didn’t. He had deep friendships lasting for decades. He was unfailingly benevolent to his assistants. His warmth, sometimes missing at
home, radiated on the rest of humanity. So as he grew old, he was not only respected and revered by his colleagues, he was loved.
They honored him, with the blend of scientific and personal camaraderie he had enjoyed since his student days, at a seventieth birthday
convocation upon his return from his Florida recuperation. Although the talks were supposed to focus on Einstein’s science, most dwelled on his
sweetness and humanity. When he walked in, there was a hush, then thunderous applause. “Einstein just had no sense at all about what absolute
reverence there was for him,” one of his assistants recalled. 37
His closest friends at the Institute bought him a present, an advanced AM-FM radio and high-fidelity record player, which they installed in his
home secretly when he was at work one day. Einstein was thrilled and used it not only for music but for news. In particular, he liked to catch Howard
K. Smith’s commentaries.
He had pretty much given up the violin by then. It was too hard on his aging fingers. Instead, he focused on the piano, which he was not quite as
good at playing. Once, after repeatedly stumbling on a passage, he turned to Margot and smiled. “Mozart wrote such nonsense here,” he said. 38
He came to look even more like a prophet, with his hair getting longer, his eyes a bit sadder and more weary. His face grew more deeply etched
yet somehow more delicate. It showed wisdom and wear but still a vitality. He was dreamy, as he was when a child, but also now serene.
“I am generally regarded as sort of a petrified object,” he noted to Max Born, then a professor in Edinburgh, one of those friends whose affection
had lasted so long. “I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds very well with my temperament ...I simply enjoy giving more than receiving in
every respect, do not take myself nor the doings of the masses seriously, am not ashamed of my weaknesses and vices, and naturally take things
as they come with equanimity and humor.” 39
Israel’s Presidency
Before the Second World War, Einstein had stated his opposition to a Jewish state when speaking to three thousand celebrants at a Manhattan
hotel seder. “My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal
power,” he said. “I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks.
We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period.” 40
After the war, he took the same stance. When he testified in Washington in 1946 to an international committee looking into the situation in
Palestine, he denounced the British for pitting Jews against Arabs, called for more Jewish immigration, but rejected the idea that the Jews should
be nationalistic. “The State idea is not in my heart,” he said in a quiet whisper that reverberated through the shocked audience of ardent Zionists. “I
cannot understand why it is needed.” 41 Rabbi Stephen Wise was flabbergasted that Einstein would break ranks with true Zionists at such a public
hearing, and he got him to sign a clarifying statement that was, in fact, not clarifying at all.
Einstein was especially dismayed by the militaristic methods used by Menachem Begin and other Jewish militia leaders, and he joined with his
occasional antagonist Sidney Hook to sign a petition in the New York Times denouncing Begin as a “terrorist” and “closely akin” to the fascists. 42
The violence was contrary to Jewish heritage. “We imitate the stupid nationalism and racial nonsense of the goyim,” he wrote a friend in 1947.
But when the State of Israel was declared in 1948, Einstein wrote the same friend to say that his attitude had changed. “I have never considered
the idea of a state a good one, for economic, political and military reasons,” he conceded. “But now, there is no going back, and one has to fight it
out.” 43
The creation of Israel caused him, yet again, to back away from the pure pacifism he had once embraced. “We may regret that we have to use
methods that are repulsive and stupid to us,” he wrote to a Jewish group in Uruguay, “but to bring about better conditions in the international sphere,
we must first of all maintain our experience by all means at our disposal.” 44
Chaim Weizmann, the indefatigable Zionist who brought Einstein to America in 1921, had become Israel’s first president, a prestigious but
generally ceremonial post in a system that vested most power in the prime minister and cabinet. When he died in November 1952, a Jerusalem
newspaper began urging that Einstein be tapped to replace him. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion bowed to the pressure, and word quickly
spread that Einstein would be asked.
It was an idea that was at once both astonishing and obvious—and also impractical. Einstein first learned of it from a small article in the New
York Times a week after Weizmann’s death. At first he and the women in his house laughed it off, but then reporters started to call. “This is very
awkward, very awkward,” he told a visitor. A few hours later, a telegram arrived from Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban. Could the
embassy, it asked, send someone the next day to see him officially?
“Why should that man come all that way,” Einstein lamented, “when I only will have to say no?”
Helen Dukas came up with the idea of simply giving Ambassador Eban a phone call. In those days, impromptu long-distance calls were
somewhat novel. To her surprise, she was able to track Eban down in Washington and put him on the line with Einstein.
“I am not the person for that and I cannot possibly do it,” Einstein said.