Review by Jenni Frazer
The Jewish Chronicle November 17, 2022
Gary Berger was working as a consultant surgeon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when he first began what became his lifelong fascination with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein.
“I had heard about the theory of relativity, but didn’t really know what it was, and wanted to educate myself,” he says.
Initially — and this was 20 years ago — he started to collect photographs of Einstein: “I just wanted to get an idea of who Einstein was.” Then, with the encouragement of Michael DiRuggiero, owner of the Manhattan Rare Book Company in New York, Berger began acquiring documents relating to Einstein’s scientific life.
Eventually the collection swelled to near unmanageable proportions. Berger, realising he needed help in organising what he had bought, invited DiRuggerio to North Carolina. The two men spent days sorting through the Einstein material. It ultimately grew to what is believed to be the biggest collection of Einstein imagery in private hands.
Berger then decided he wanted others to enjoy the “Einsteiniana” — and so around four years ago he and DiRuggerio started work on a magnificent book.
It’s a justly hefty volume of 51 portrait photographs of Einstein, many signed and dated by the man himself, entitled Einstein: The Man and His Mind, with publication timed to coincide with the centenary of Einstein’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. The book also includes images of some of the original formulas and papers that rightly led to Einstein being regarded as the best-known scientist in the world.
The book is a treasure chest of unexpected Einstein facts. Here are 12 things we learn from it:
1. The very first image is an Einstein unfamiliar to most people: it’s the teenage Albert, aged just 17, and is thought to have been taken in 1896 to mark his graduation from school in Aarau, Switzerland.
He signed it and gave it to his close friend, another Albert, Albert Karr-Karusi. Berger and DiRuggiero liken the photograph handover to high-school students signing their yearbook.
Though we are not used to seeing Einstein as a teenager, his trademark shock of hair — sticking straight up as though he had been plugged into the mains — is clear to see.
2. Between 1910 and 1922, Albert Einstein was nominated 62 times for the Nobel Prize by his colleagues.
His win was finally announced on 9 November 1922 “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
He wasn’t able to travel to Stockholm to receive his prize in 1922, only making his acceptance speech in July 1923.
3. Albert was a bit of a fashion maverick. There are photographs in the book of him quite plainly not wearing socks, which he apparently regarded as a waste of time, and didn’t even bother wearing them for a meeting with US President Roosevelt, or for his naturalisation ceremony to become an American citizen.
But though he was often pictured in what looks like a disreputable sweater, marked with tiny burns from his ever-present pipe, his favourite garment was his even more beaten-up leather jacket. He bought it on his arrival in America in 1933 and is said to have loved the jacket because it “made him feel more American”.
4. In fact, the brown leather bomber jacket was made by jeans specialists Levi Strauss. In a lovely coda, Albert Einstein’s “Cossack” jacket went up for auction in 2016 — and was bought, by Levi’s, for $146,744.
They put it in their own museum, but have since produced limited versions of the Einstein bomber for present-day wearers. The auctioneer said at the time that the jacket still seemed to give off little puffs of Einstein’s pipe smoke.
5. The book contains pictures by some of the best-known photographers of the day, some of whose names still resonate.
A 1938 photo of Einstein in that jacket (which he appears to have lived in in lieu of a coat) was taken by Lottie Jacobi, said to be one of Albert’s favourite snappers. But Berger and DiRuggiero say that photographers were practically falling over themselves to take pictures of the scientist, frequently succeeding in getting him to sign the photographs as authentication.
He often gave signed pictures of himself to friends, but Berger and DiRuggiero tell us that in return he sometimes received gifts vastly outweighing the pictures in value. For example, in 1928, to mark the 50th birthday of his good friend and personal physician Janos Plesch, Einstein had a portrait photograph taken at a studio in Berlin and presented it to Plesch, signed and dated.
Four months later, the authors say, Plesch came up with a stunning present for Einstein’s 50th birthday: he “arranged for the city of Berlin to grant Einstein, its most famous citizen, lifelong rights to live in a country house that was part of a large lakeside estate that the city had acquired. There he would be able to escape, sail his wooden boat, and scribble his equations in serenity.”
Of course, Einstein wasn’t able to enjoy this extraordinary bounty for long, since everything, including the boat, was ultimately confiscated by the Nazis. Just the same…
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