A relatively true account
Albert Einstein Speaking north
Canongate, £17.99
Reviewed by Daniel Snowman
OU OPPOSE Zionism?” a colleague asks Albert Einstein soon after the end of the First World War. “No,” is the reply. “As a human being, I’m an opponent of nationalism. But, as a Jew, I’m a supporter of the Jewish Zionist efforts… One can be internationally minded without renouncing interest in one’s tribal comrades.”
Much of R. J. Gadney’s engaging biography-as-novel consists of dialogue between Einstein and those close to him, as the great man struggles to accommodate the constantly shifting demands of both his professional and his private life.
The book opens with (and its title is taken from) his response to a phone call he receives in 1954 on his 75th birthday. It is from a girl of 17 who has apparently dialled a wrong number. No, Einstein insists, as he starts talking to her: “You have the right number.” And, over the remaining year of his life, a friendship develops between them.
Einstein is nothing if not openminded: everything can — and probably should — be questioned, whether it be the laws of physics, the conventions of politics or the intricacies of personal intimacy. Celebrated for a theory few understand, this shaggyhaired, unself-conscious genius finds himself moving from one city and job to another and between a succession of variably insecure relationships.
Throughout this peripatetic existence, Albert gains comfort in his often solitary intellectual curiosity, from playing with a small compass he is given on his fifth birthday, or reading Struwwelpeter a few years later, to speculating about the relationship between mass, energy and the speed of light.
The one constant, the great emotional and intellectual anchor in his life, is his work — and the joy he feels when, fully relaxed, he can puff quietly on his pipe or pick up his violin and play Mozart.
Globally revered by the time he is 40, Albert finds himself visiting America, where, with Chaim Weizmann, he helps raise money for a future university in Jerusalem. We see him in the Far East, and in Palestine, where his host is Herbert Samuel. Returning to Berlin in March 1923, Einstein finds a city racked by inflation and a rising tide of antisemitism, and when Hitler comes to power a decade later, Einstein, on his travels again, goes via Antwerp and London (where he delivers a passionate anti-War speech to a packed Royal Albert Hall) to the USA and a post at Princeton, where he remains for the rest of his life.
The book is packed with vivid dialogue, anecdotes, images and excerpts from letters and speeches, much of it doubtless easy to check. But don’t look to Gadney for detailed sources; rather, sit back and enjoy a highly readable fictionalised volume that includes everything from single-sentence explanations of relativity to ultra-candid bedroom talk that I could not possibly quote in a respectable, family journal like the JC!
Daniel Snowman is a writer and lecturer
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