Alice Calaprice - Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children

The author will donate a portion of the author's royalties of this book to UNICEF

t is a boon as well as a burden to have the Einstein name all of one's life. My first encounters with people would probably have been different if I had introduced myself as Evelyn Smith or Evelyn Jones. The expectations that others had of me seemed to be higher because I was "an Einstein." So, if I did well in school, there was never any special praise, yet the children still thought of me as a teacher's pet. I was always fearful that people would be angry with me if I did not live up to my name.

My grandfather died when I was fourteen, so naturally all contact ended at that time. I wish I could have known him in my adulthood so that we could have shared experiences, ideas, and speculations. Though he never tried to influence my thoughts, I still feel a great kinship with him in terms of our worldview.

I was born just a few months before the United States entered World War II, at a time when my grandfather was occupied with war and humanitarian concerns at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. I have no recollection of our first meeting, but it must have been during the early 1940s, before the end of the war, when I was just a toddler and we were on a visit from North Carolina. I've been told that I went sailing with him on his sailboat Tinnef, and that he was impressed that I loved to sail at my young age, and that I wasn't afraid of the water. After the war, my family moved to California, and our contacts with Princeton became less frequent. At that time, it was not so easy as it is today to hop onto an airplane for visits to see one's grandpa for the holidays. And though my grandfather had visited California in the 1930s, he did not leave the East Coast after he moved to Princeton because he was always so busy. So most of what I knew and heard about him came from a distance, but I never thought of him as anything more than my grandfather.

In 1953 I was sent off to Switzerland to boarding school, and I came back home only once until 1958. Because my parents were from Europe, they wanted me to be raised culturally as a European, though I know it must have been hard for my mother to send me away for so long. She was a warm and kind woman who had been devoted to her children, but my father was more distant and was able to remove himself from our lives more easily. Therefore, aside from the sailing episode when I was a toddler, my memories of seeing my grandfather stem from the times we stopped in Princeton on the way to Europe and on the way back.

My grandfather lived on Mercer Street in a twostory white house with a front porch and columns. A staircase led upstairs to his office. Except when he was busy, I felt welcome in his presence because he made me feel very much at ease. Even when I was only five, he never talked down at me or intimidated me. I was astonished, because in my experi ence with adults, it was best to stay out of their way. Maybe I was a welcome diversion from other things that were going on in his life. He loved wooden toys and puzzles that came apart and could be put back together again-this is how I remember playing with him.

I loved astronomy as a child. I loved looking out the window at night at the enormous, dark clear sky above me. I first became aware of the wonders of the sky when I was in summer camp in the central valley of California and when we spent time in the mountains. And later, in boarding school, the stars seemed especially beautiful in the alps of Switzerland. I hunted for constellations and let my imagination go wild with thoughts of space travel in the outer reaches of the universe. My grandfather knew about my galactic fascinations as a child and gave me a book I still have today called The Stars for Sam. He inscribed it for me with a loving message, appreciating my curiosity about the universe. I maintained my interest in the reaches of outer space throughout my adulthood and even became an ardent Star Trek fan.

My grandfather and I continued to correspond into my teen years until he died. I would tell him about the things that were going on in my life, and he would make comments acknowledging that they were of interest to him. And, like my father before me, I would write and ask him to help me with geometry problems, and he never failed to reply, sometimes telling me I had used a clever approach to solving a problem.

In this collection of letters, therefore, the ones that I appreciate most are those that my grandfather exchanged with the South African girl, Tyfanny, who was spending her high school years in a boarding school and liked to look up at the sky. Tyfanny could easily have been me. Perhaps that's why my grandfather took the time to correspond with her, because she reminded him of me.

This collection is a fine representation of the esteem that children had for my grandfather, and of his willingness to respond to some of them even though he was busier than most people. He respected children and liked their curiosity and fresh approach to life and therefore did not want to ignore them. It is clear to me, however, that, unlike most of today's letters from celebrities, his words are his own. I hope the letters will inspire kids to partake again in the declining art of correspondence so that legacies such as these can be left for future generations.

Evelyn Einstein

January 2002

n my previous books on Einstein, I published documented sound bites from Einstein's various writings in an attempt to separate the mythological Einstein from the real human being. A characteristic of myths and folklore is that there is no correct or final version-people embellish and personalize what they hear, and then pass along their own interpretations in the retelling. This has often been done with Einstein's words, in that people attach his name to words they think will give credi bility to their cause or idea but which he more than likely never said. But it is not a myth that Einstein respected and admired children, even though he sometimes may have sounded harsh in chastising them. The letters and a few other documents pertaining to children are presented here in full (except in two cases of excerpts from long letters to his own sons) so that there is no chance of future embellishment or misrepresentation. Readers who want a more complete picture of the "Man of the Century" can consult the supplemental biographical and bibliographical material included at the back of this book.