Features
The Dark Side of Albert: Einstein and Mileva Marić, his First Wife
By DAVID TOPPER Albert Einstein was the most photographed scientist of the 20th century. The scope of emotions depicted range from the serious to the silly: from looking like a secular saint with hands folded and deep in contemplation of supposedly solemn thoughts, to the image hanging in front of me on the bulletin board over my computer table, showing him sticking out his tongue at the cameraman. Living during the heyday of the development of the film camera, he and the press surely took advantage of it. The positive persona of the genius was formed out of these visual images. This visual disposition was supplemented with endless quotations on not only science and the universe, but also with homilies on life and how to live it, with much of that which you will find quoted, being things he never said. Overall, the general image of him and his personality has him coming out seemingly squeaky-clean.
Nonetheless, those of us who have looked into the man in more detail are aware of episodes of less than saintly behavior by Albert – the famous scientific idol. If, for example, you read any of the half-dozen or so lengthy biographies about him, you will find scattered therein stories of him speaking inappropriately or behaving, one might say, as a jerk. Having read all those books, and others – and even written three books on him myself – I knew this. So when I started reading a recent long biography of his first wife, Mileva Marić, I had no reason to think I’d be shocked, since I had already read a lot about her, including a book of letters to and from her best friend, which also contained a brief biography. But to my surprise, I was staggered in reading over 400 pages of his nasty behavior concentrated around this one woman – a woman whom he fell in love with as a university student, and who was the only mother of his children.
Here is the sad – and probably surprising to most readers – story of Mileva and Albert.
Mileva Marić was born on December 19, 1875, into a Christian Orthodox Serbian family. With a dislocated left hip, she walked with a limp throughout her life. (Her sister, Zorka, had the same congenital condition.) Forced to wear an orthopedic shoe, she was teased and mocked in school. Nonetheless, this very bright girl filled her lonely childhood with her studies (she was especially good at math) and piano lessons. Encouraged by a very loving father, she excelled in school, and was the first girl to attend high school physics courses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating in 1896, she applied to the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, since in Switzerland women were admitted to all classes. She passed the entrance exam and majored in mathematics. It was a small freshman class of about two-dozen students, she being the only woman. That’s where she met, in the even smaller physics course, fellow student, Albert Einstein.
One of the earliest pictures we have of Mileva is dated 1897. In this portrait, I see a very serious, confident, determined woman with large penetrating eyes, a full crop of dark wavy hair and full lips. I would call her plain but attractive. I say this, because I was shocked at several instances when someone, upon first meeting Mileva, is quoted as describing her as “ugly.”
As a fellow student, Albert Einstein was attracted to her, and they quickly became a couple. He probably was the first male to take a romantic interest in her, overlooking her “handicap.” I suspect he was attracted to her gutsy attitude and her smartness. Plus, being Serbian, Mileva exuded an exotic “otherness” to the “German” in Albert. They spent most of their free time together, studying and falling in love. She did well in her courses, initially passing all of them, as Albert did too (of course). That is, until she was pregnant – a fact she tried to hide until she could not. And so she went home to her parents to inform them of this, and eventfully to have the baby.
Her parents were very supportive, which was unusual for the times. A girl was born early in 1902; they named her Lieserl (probably a Yiddish diminutive of Liese, a shortened Elizabeth). Albert stayed in Zurich and never saw his daughter; she was raised by Mileva’s parents, as Mileva returned to Zurich to continue her studies. No one knows what ultimately happened to Lieserl; she has seemingly vanished from all records. She may have died from Scarlet Fever as a child; or, she may have been adopted and grew up. One thing I do know: Mileva never forgot her. I believe that the loss of Lieserl is the major reason for Mileva’s depression and lingering melancholia throughout her life – as will be seen. As a result, she didn’t take care of her grooming and was a bit overweight – as seen in photos of her later in life. This, I suspect, may be a source of her “ugliness.”
Back to Zurich in the late 1890s and her studies: she passed all her courses over the first three years, and in her fourth year she started her thesis, hoping for a diploma and further work toward a PhD. But in 1900 she failed her final exams, while the other male students all passed. In July 1901 she repeated her final exams and flunked them again. I find it hard to believe that this sudden change in her performance was due to the tests being too tough for this woman, in light of all we know of her up to this time. Look at the last date above: she was pregnant with her child. I’m convinced that she just couldn’t concentrate on her studies. Albert passed, graduated, and started looking for a job – as well as working toward his PhD.
On January 6, 1903, they were married in a small civil ceremony. Mileva became a housewife; no more thinking of going any further in her studies. She then became the mother of two boys: Hans Albert (born in 1904) and Eduard (nicknamed Tete; in 1910).
All that promise came to nothing, not even a university degree. If she had not met Albert, who knows what she would have achieved? But that was not the path taken, and since she married what became the most famous scientist of the 20th century – if not the most famous person, as Time Magazine said at the end of the millennium – that’s why there is a plethora of documentation about her life, terribly sad as it was.
Now briefly fast forward a century or so, to around 1987, and the publication of the early love letters between Albert and Mileva, which had only been known by a few, and purposely suppressed. For example, Hans Albert, who had the letters much earlier, had wanted to publish them. But he was thwarted by Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan, who threatened litigation. Dukas was Albert’s lifelong secretary and Nathan was an economist and close friend, who eventually was the executor of Einstein’s will. And so, the letters never surfaced until Dukas and Nathan were both dead.
Even today, writing about these letters is an ideological minefield. Here’s why. The letters date from 1899 to 1903, when a new theory of physics was brewing in Albert’s mind. The result, in the so-called miracle year of 1905, was the publication of five papers that changed physics forever: two on what became his Theory of Relativity; one on a particle theory (much later called a photon) of light, as part of the emerging Quantum Theory; and two supporting the reality of atoms, which were still only hypothetical entities at this time. Knowing this, how much can we read into the love letters when Albert, in talking about his scientific ideas, uses “we” and “our work”? Well, it seems, a lot; for the initial response from primarily feminist quarters was that Mileva should at least be seen as a co-author of the famous papers, since it seemed that they conceived of the theory together. Given, as we will see, Albert’s shabby treatment of her later in life, then all the more sympathy was directed toward Mileva and her plight by history. Indeed, some went so far (you will still find websites saying this) that Albert stole the theory of relativity from Mileva. Nonetheless, after that initial flurry of debate, the consensus has moved away from this viewpoint, so that today the select scholars looking over the Einstein Papers Project in Pasadena, California assert unabashedly that Mileva made no input to Albert’s theory.
Nonetheless, I am one of the few “Einstein scholars” (if I may call myself such), who gives Mileva some credit in the 1905 marvel. She was good at mathematics, she had patience in her life and work, and she was a thorough researcher – all qualities severely lacking in Albert. Let me put it this way: over his life as a physicist, Einstein hired a series of companions (whom he called “calculators”) to do the tedious and complicated mathematics required for his theory, especially as it developed over the later years with the use of tensor calculus in his General Theory of Relativity. All were men; except, famously, his last calculator was the Israeli-American woman, Buria Kaufmann – about whom you will read in the literature as his “first female calculator.” (Incidentally, there is a website giving her credit for Einstein’s later theory, which is complete fiction.) I, however, would assert that Buria was the second woman; for Mileva was Albert’s first “calculator.” She was also his researcher and proofreader. Since she knew the physics, as we know from the letters, she also was his sounding-board – Albert bouncing ideas off of Mileva, as they say.
So, what about Albert speaking of “we” and “our work”? Let me put this into context by quoting from some of the letters in chronological order. In a letter Mileva wrote to Helene Savić (née Kaufler), her closest and longest friend throughout her life (they roomed together in a boarding house in Zurich when they were students), she speaks of a paper “written” by Albert that will be published soon that is “very significant.” She then says that “we” sent it to an important physicist – revealing how much she was involved with Albert’s work. Later in a letter from Albert to Mileva, let me quote from the opening lines to give you a trace of their intimacy: “Thank you very much for your little letter and all the true love that’s in it. I kiss and hug you for it from all my heart, exactly the way you would want it & are entitled to, love.” He then goes into a discussion of other people, followed by his going back to how much they love each other, and ending with this key sentence. “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion.” I put in italics the famous (or is it infamous?) phrase: our work. But there’s nothing more on this, although a bit later in the letter he goes on to talk about another physics problem he is working on: specific heats. He discusses the physics problem in detail, with equations and his proposed solution, and he ends the topic with this: “Don’t forget to look up to what extent glass obeys the law of Dulong and Petit.” My guess is that it was this sort of task that was part of their work together. The letter ends where it began. “Tender greetings and kisses, my dear little dumpling, from your … Albert.”
I’ll leave the topic there, nonetheless aware of the possibility that Mileva did help Albert in even more significant ways, and that hence she’s been slighted by history.
Back to Zurich in 1903. Initially, their life together was harmonious, a reflection of the camaraderie in the love letters, as she kept house and raised her boys. But by around 1909, when Albert was being seen as an important physicist, there clearly was a severe strain on the marriage. For example, in a letter that year to Helene, she says that Albert “lives only for his work” and the family is “unimportant to him.” By 1914, when they moved to Berlin for Albert’s prestigious position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, their marriage entered a new phase. In fact, Albert had been having relations with a divorced cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who lived in Berlin. Moreover, Albert made it clear to Mileva that their previous relationship was over. He went so far as to give her a list of demands: that she do the laundry, prepare him three meals a day, and keep his office clean – all without any personal relations. No intimacy in the house, and no being together in public. It was degradingly cruel: Mileva’s role was reduced to being a maid and cook. She tried to accept it, but quickly found that she couldn’t endure the humiliation; and so she took her two boys back to Zurich, where she remained for the rest of her life.
They officially divorced in 1919, and Albert immediately married Elsa – all in the same year that he became the world-famous scientist, because of the solar eclipse experiment that proved that light from a star is bent around the sun, as predicted by his theory. He got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and transferred the money to a bank in Zurich for the support of their boys, where Mileva had access to the interest in the account.
What happened after all that infatuation seen in the love letters and in their early life together? In retrospect, Mileva surely realized that she had ignored or overlooked what we might call the dark side of Albert. As a student he was overly sarcastic, often mocking and even degrading people whom he saw as inadequate or not too smart. He even teased her in ways that revealed an underlying hostility. When she pointed this out, he would laugh it off – and she’d forgive him. In a letter to Helena in 1900 she writes of Albert’s “wicked words with deeds! What an insolent boy he is, and yet I love him so much!” Telling words. Even after the acrimonious divorce, she still, as will be seen, was under Albert’s spell. I believe that she never got over that initial infatuation when they were students. It became a pattern: she was always trying to get on his good side.
Overall, Albert was very much a 19th century male chauvinist in his attitude and communications with women. Here are some of his words about women that reveal his overt misogyny: they are “passive, insecure, needy, and wanting to be dominated.” I knew that he liked to flirt with women throughout his life. But seeing him do so with other wives, with Mileva present, made it less frivolous and more malicious. In short, he was a cad and a rake, rolled into one.
The turnaround in their relationship seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was petty and vindictive, and especially very cruel towards her. There is no direct evidence of any real physical abuse. However, there was an incident in the spring of 1913 when a friend reported seeing Mileva with a badly swollen face, which was attributed to a “toothache” – and hence she and Albert missed some social events. Possibly the swollen face was a sign of something more malevolent, but we will never know the truth. Nonetheless, pondering this, I wish to quote something Albert wrote in a letter in 1925: “Not only children need a bit of thrashing, but also grownups and especially women.” And I’ll leave it there.
After the divorce, he accused her of poisoning his relationship with the boys – a common trope between divorcing couples. But it got more vicious as her financial situation became grave, and she asked for more money. She made some extra money tutoring students in math and giving piano lessons. But it wasn’t enough. Albert’s letters to her contain nasty personal attacks: saying she is “abnormal,” a “nonentity,” and that her pleading is “rubbish.” I can only imagine how Mileva felt being called this. At the time, she was in severe physical pain with chronic back problems, often forcing her into bed for long periods, even stays in hospital, when she was trying to raise two boys alone. Moreover, all this was exacerbated by problems in her Serbian family. Her sister Zorka was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in and out of asylums; her only living brother disappeared into Russia after World War I; and her parents had serious financial problems.
Could it get any worse? It could. And it did. Tete became a handful. He was very bright and creative; he had musical talent on the piano, and he wrote promising poems and stories. But he was also prone to falling into depressive episodes, for apparently no reason – anger fits, throwing things, being out of control. I suppose Mileva saw this coming: Tete, like her sister, eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Albert, of course, knew all this, but being in Berlin, he didn’t have to deal with it. He did make occasional visits and took summer trips with the boys (giving Mileva short breaks), all while he was still living in Europe. But when he moved to Princeton, N.J., in 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany and Einstein’s name being high on a hit list, their meetings were over; until 1938, when Hans Albert (now with a wife and two children) moved to the USA. The last meeting between Albert and Tete is recorded in a 1933 photograph that bears a close look. Both are seated in a room, with Tete looking over a large, open portfolio – perhaps reading it. Albert is facing in a different direction (about 90-degrees away), holding a violin and bow, and staring off into space. It may be that Tete is reading to him, but more likely they are inhabiting two different worlds.
In the years during World War II, living in Zurich, Switzerland (a country surrounded by a Nazi-occupied Europe), Mileva was terrified that the Nazis would swoop up this last free space. Moreover, she knew that they were rounding up Jews by the trainloads and moving them to Concentration Camps. She was somewhat safe as an Orthodox Christian, but Tete was “Jewish,” being a child of Einstein. She wrote pleading letters to Albert, asking him to take Tete to the USA. She even contacted the Red Cross, and they agreed that the best bet was to get Albert to sponsor him. “Bring us to safety,” she wrote. But being Mileva – ever still the dutiful wife, even though they had been divorced for two decades – she added (and I assert that she was not being sarcastic in saying this), “[I am] not intending to disturb your peace and freedom.” Petrified that “Tete is in danger because he is your son,” she concluded: “you can’t just leave him in the lurch.”
In fact, Einstein, Dukas, and Nathan were diligently rescuing Jews from Europe by using Einstein’s name to get emigration papers and such. Albert once spoke of this, saying that they were running a little refugee office over his cluttered “lawyer’s desk.” And they did save lives. Relevant here is a 1939 letter from Albert to Helena on this very topic. Helena’s father was Jewish, and she had numerous relatives whose lives were in peril, and so apparently, she was asking Albert for help. He wrote in response. “How gladly would I help! But I am desperately trying to at least get younger people out. Relocation of old people must under present horrible conditions be set aside.” In the end, we know of two aunts of Helena who died in gas chambers. Interestingly, in this same letter, Albert mentions that Hans is now in America, but that Tete is with Mileva in Zurich, saying that Tete is “incurably mentally ill.”
So, what about Tete? And Mileva’s pleading letters? As far as we know, these pleading requests were never answered. Albert, it seems, did leave his son “in the lurch.” My guess is that he just couldn’t fathom the chaos in his life of dealing with someone with such a severe mental illness. Listen to what he later wrote to Hans about Tete after learning of Mileva’s death. “If I had been fully informed [apparently referring here to what he saw as a genetic mental illness in Mileva’s family], he [Tete] would never have come into the world.” I can only imagine how Hans must have felt after reading these appalling words from his father about his beloved brother. Sometimes Albert’s behavior is plainly pathetic. Fortunately, the Nazis never invaded Switzerland.
Much of Mileva’s adult life was centred on Tete, as she watched him descend into the depths of mental illness. Overweight and chain-smoking, he was in and out of mental institutions. For Mileva, he was a full-time job. She, being the caring mother, was obsessed with making sure he would be safe after she died. And she succeeded; for seven years after his mother died, he lived in the renowned Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. He was 55 when he died.
I believe Mileva never got over two things: the loss of Lieserl and her infatuation with Albert. We don’t know what happened to Lieserl; but Mileva surely did, and it haunted her all of her life; as seen, she flunked her final chance for a university degree because of it. Lieserl was a source of her constant despondent behaviour and possibly her so-called “ugliness.” In a letter to Helena in 1925 she wrote of “my unfulfilled desire for a daughter”– another telling phrase, since she had a daughter, but was forced to abandon her.
Regarding Albert, no matter how abusive he was, Mileva still was open to forgiveness. She once asked herself this question: “When has a man ever listened to reason, when a woman is involved?” She should have listened to her own words.
Mileva Marić died on August 4, 1948, at the age of 72.
This story of Albert falling in and out of love with Mileva was not the first such episode in his life. It was previewed by and even overlapped with his first sweetheart: Marie Winteler.
In 1895 he spent a year enrolled in the cantonal school in the town of Aarau, near Zurich. He had taken the rigorous entrance exams for the Polytechnic (which Mileva later passed) and had flunked the non-science and non-math parts. But since he did so well on the science and math parts, it was recommended that he do a year of make-up in Aarau; plus, he was applying at age 16, a year early. He boarded with the family of Jost Winteler, a teacher at the school. Jost and Pauline had three daughters, the prettiest being Marie, two years older than Albert. Albert quickly fell for her, and she for him. She was an accomplished pianist, and so their love interests were supplemented with piano and violin duets. After that year, and after passing the entrance requirement at the Polytechnic, Albert moved to Zurich – where he met Mileva, and then broke off with Marie. In short, he jilted her, as he would later do with Mileva.
Marie, however, thought the relationship was to be forever, and wrote pleading letters when he stopped writing to her. After all, he was still mailing her his dirty laundry to wash and send back. (I am not making this up.) Being deeply hurt, she fell into a depression that (may have) plagued her throughout her life. She became a schoolteacher (whose records show that she missed a lot of classes due to sickness); in 1911 she married a man whose first name was Albert. They had two boys, but divorced in 1927. We also know that she tried to reach the first Albert in the 1940s about emigrating to the USA, but there is no record of his having received her letters. (Albert’s secretary was known to censor his mail.) She died in a mental institution in 1957, two years after Einstein died.
I mention this for two reasons. One, the obvious – this being a preview to the story of Albert’s shabby treatment of Mileva and the parallel terrible consequences. The other reason is the dirty laundry. This, also obviously, needs to be explained.
In 2019 I published an historical novel on Einstein’s life, called A Solitary Smile. In it, Marie is one of the characters, especially near the end and in a dream sequence that has Einstein recalling their time together, where he realizes how he hurt her. In recalling this part of my book, while writing this story of Mileva, and now Marie again – I suddenly realized that I didn’t include the dirty laundry bit. Why? I knew it then, as I do now. So why not mention it? Ruminating on this, I can only surmise that I was subconsciously protecting Albert from more scorn. Why dig up all the dirt (seemingly, literally in this case). How interesting this is. Me, being part of the problem. Protecting Albert’s image.
Well, I caught myself. And here I acknowledge my error – to supplement my saga on the dark side of Albert Einstein.
* * *
Readings: Mileva Marić Einstein: Life with Albert Einstein, by Radmila Milentijević (United World Press, 2010). In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić: Einstein’s First Wife, edited by Milan Popović (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A Solitary Smile: A Novel on Einstein, by David R. Topper (Bee Line Press, 2019).
Features
“Two Weeks in Toronto” is a sweet romantic novel, but with some major shortcomings
Review by BERNIE BELLAN As the former publisher of The Jewish Post & News, but still publisher of a popular website – jewishpostandnews.ca, I’ve long been inundated with requests to review books.
I tend to ignore almost all those requests – simply because I don’t have other reviewers available who are willing to review books – unlike years past when there were a few different individuals who would be willing to review books for the paper, so it falls on me to do all the reviewing.
Something else that’s happened more and more often in recent years is that authors become their own publicists and can be quite good at drawing attention to their books.
So it was that when I was contacted a month ago by a writer by the name of Amelia Doyle, who asked me whether I’d be interested in reading a book she’d written titled “Two Weeks in Toronto,” the name of that book was familiar to me as Amelia had contacted me last year to ask me whether I’d like to review her book back then.
I did take her up on her offer at that time – and began to read “Two Weeks in Toronto” but, if truth, be told, I lost interest in it. The book had some major flaws – and as romantic fiction I thought it lacked any real spark.
But, when Amelia contacted me again, this time her email noted that the book was a finalist in something called the Canadian Book Club Awards.
Really? I thought. Maybe I was too quick to put that book down – or to turn off my Kindle – as the case may be.
So, I began to read “Two Weeks in Toronto” all over again – with a promise to myself to finish it this time.
I should also add that of the many emails I’ve been receiving in recent years, many have been either from publicists for books or from the authors themselves, and many of the books I’ve been asked to review have been self-published.
It’s not all that difficult to publish a book nowadays and, in fact, many self-published books that I have read have been quite good.
In the case of “Two Weeks in Toronto,” after opening the book again many months after I had first taken a look at it though, I saw that it was published by something called “BRINKLEY Verlag.” I did some research on BRINKLEY Verlag and saw that it’s an Austrian publishing house, but with no information on its website whether it simply publishes books for a fee or whether it actually accepts manuscripts and publishes them without charging the author.
Also, on the title page of “Two Weeks in Toronto,” it says that the book was edited by someone by the name of Kelly McErlean.
Okay – the book had been published by some sort of publishing house and apparently, it had also been edited. I regarded both those things as pluses.
One more thing: I did do some research on Amelia Doyle and saw that she has authored at least a couple of other books: “A Dublin Love Story” and “The Rabbi’s Wife,” so she must have had at least some practice writing novels, I thought. By the way, if you Google Amelia Doyle and see what books she’s written, you can see they’re all described as “sweet romance.”
What does this have to do with my reviewing the book? you must be wondering.
Well, I’ve been in correspondence with Amelia Doyle and she seems such a nice person that I told myself I have to find something good to say about “Two Weeks in Toronto.”
But honestly, I tend to look at the novels my wife likes to read for guidance as to what women like when it comes to romance and many of the titles I see have a mystery element to them – or some rip roaring sex!
Here’s what AI says when you ask it what kind of romance novels women like to read: “Most women enjoy diverse romance novels, from steamy contemporary/spicy reads and funny rom-coms (like Emily Henry) to emotional historical sagas (like Outlander) or ‘romantasy,’ but popular choices often feature strong emotional connection, relatable characters, satisfying happily ever afters’ (HEA), and tropes like enemies-to-lovers or billionaire romance, with recent trends favoring diverse voices and escapism.”
So where does “Two Weeks in Toronto” fit into any of those descriptions, if any?
Well, it does have a romance at the centre of it, but the romance is so predictable that it hardly whets the appetite.
What it does have though, and which might make it of particular interest to Jewish readers, is a female Jewish protagonist by the name of Ciara Walsh. (Ciara, I had to look up, is an Irish name, and is pronounced Kee-ara. What a nice name!)
The person with whom you just know from the outset Ciara is going to fall in love is her dreamy Irish dentist, Ethan O’Leary, tall and blue-eyed – and strange as it may seem: unattached.
At a certain point we find out that Ciara is Jewish – when Ethan comments on the mezuzah on her door, but as to how Jewish she is – well, that was something I began to wonder about as the book went on.
Now, it’s important to note that the book is set right around Christmas – and Chanukah, and the juxtaposition of those two holidays enters into the plot time and time again. There seemed to be so little distinction between the atmosphere pervading both holidays – wintertime, gift giving, family get-togethers, that I wondered whether Amelia Doyle might not be Jewish, but was trying to attract a Jewish audience by injecting some Jewish notes into her book – so I asked her this question: “Are you Jewish in any way, e.g., have some Jewish family?”
Amelia answered: I’m halachically Jewish. “Both my parents come from observant Jewish families and I grew up in a Conservative home.
“Generally speaking, you can find anything from ultra-orthodox to atheist Jews in my family. As you can imagine, living in Europe is not easy as a Jewish person. (I should note that, after further researching Amelia, I discovered that she lives in Dublin.)
“The characters in ‘Two Weeks in Toronto’ were written on purpose in a matter that is more on the liberal side as many of my friends are Reform or in interfaith marriages. This is where the inspiration for this specific book came from.”
In the same email in which I asked Amelia whether she was indeed Jewish, I also noted that I thought the way she intermingled Christmas and Chanukah was deliberately intended to “resonate” with non-Jewish readers.
Amelia responded: “I’m Jewish and there are many ways of practicing Judaism. In this book I decided to write about a non-orthodox Jewish family.”
A “non-orthodox Jewish family?” There’s not much Jewish about them, other than the fact that Ciara’s father, Ian, decided to convert to Judaism when he was younger – for reasons that are totally unexplained. Ciara’s mother, Giuliana (which, apparently, is the Italian spelling for Juliana), is definitely not Jewish, although she doesn’t seem to have much religious orientation either way.
But, let’s not get lost in what is, in essence, a discussion totally irrelevant to this book.
My qualms with “Two Weeks in Toronto” have to do with the writing style – which could have used some good editing. I mentioned that in an email to the author when I was just getting into the book. I suggested that the dialogue could have been much improved had the characters used contractions when speaking, so that for instance, instead of a character saying “I am just stepping out” they could have said, “I’m just stepping out” – which sounds so much more authentic.
Another aspect of this book that drove me crazy is there no explanation for the behaviour of Ciara’s mother, Giuliana, or her sister, Gabriella. Cinderella’s stepmother comes across as kindly compared to Giuliana and, as for Gabriella, who is occasionally referred to as “Bridezilla” by others, well – to use the Cinderella comparison again, she is beyond detestable.
But why? What on earth could sweet, loving Ciara ever have done to provoke such unbridled hatred from her mother and sister? I kept waiting to read an answer – you know, like Ciara was so beautiful that her sister despised her or Giuliana was her stepmother – but no, it’s never explained.
And then there’s Ciara’s relationship with Ethan. Yes, it’s cute how they end up going to Toronto together – to attend Gabriella’s wedding, and they end up sleeping in the same bed together – but without having sex!
So, again, I had to ask Amelia why that was? Here’s what she answered: “In my opinion, most romance books these days are far too explicit. ‘Sweet Romances’ (also known as ‘Clean Romance’) are on the rise again at the moment and this is what my publisher asked me to write.
“Personally, I prefer to have the focus on the relationship and not any sexual relations.
“Not sure about how it is in Canada, but many publishers in Europe as well as the US started publishing ‘clean’ versions of steamier books, not to alienate readers who don’t want to read sexually explicit scenes.”
I’m shattered! “Clean romances” are “on the rise again?” (There’s almost a phallic pun in there, but we won’t go there.)
But hey, it’s almost Chanukah – and Christmas. “Two Weeks in Toronto” is set right around this time of year, so maybe this review is timely. As it’s referred to in the book, this is a book that might make a good read for “Chrismuakkah.”
“Two Weeks in Toronto”
By Amelia Doyle
Published by BRINKLY Vertag, 2024
179 pages
Available on Amazon
Features
Today’s “Anti-Zionist” Propaganda was Nurtured in the Soviet Union
By HENRY SREBRNIK For centuries, Jews have been portrayed, by both religious and secular movements, as obstacles to universal order. Christian theology turned Judaism into the emblem of stubborn particularity. Modern ideologies secularized the script, making Jews stand for capitalism, communism, cosmopolitanism, or cultural decay. In the twentieth century, this logic reached its most lethal form in the fantasy of human renewal through the erasure of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.
The twenty-first-century iteration recycles the same template in overlapping ways. Islamist movements merge “Jew,” “Zionist,” and “Israeli” into a demonic category whose elimination is a sacred duty. Parts of the Western left have reduced Israel to the very symbol of colonial domination.
What North American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of anti-Zionism spreads in left-of-centre spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s Soviet Union. Just like antisemites battle against a fantasy of “the Jews” that exists in their own heads, the new anti-Zionists battle a “Zionism” that is conjured up by their own fevered imaginations.
Following the June 1967 war, with Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbours, who were intent on destroying the small Jewish state, anti-Zionism became a central tenet of Soviet propaganda, where “Zionism” was usually equated with self-conscious expressions of Jewishness. It was then that the antisemitic notion of Israel as an heir to Nazism and Fascism was popularized in the Soviet media.
It depicted Israel as the outpost of colonial oppression, Jews as betrayers of socialist internationalism. Soviet propagandists distorted the history of Zionism to underscore its supposedly inherent evil nature, ripping its founders and theorists out of historical context and, absurdly, presenting Zionists as the Jewish people’s greatest enemy. These “rootless cosmopolitans” were accused of corrupting socialism from within. By redefining Jews as racists, Zionism as colonialism, the Soviets handed progressives a vocabulary of virtue through which to disguise an old hatred.
In political cartoons and Soviet propaganda art, swastikas were routinely intertwined with Stars of David, and the Israeli military portrayed as resembling Nazi — and specifically SS — troops. If there is a Soviet propaganda subtext that highlights its ideological and propagandistic roots, it would be “Fascism Under a Blue Star,” the 1971 book by Evgeny Evseev, who had served as an Arabic interpreter for both Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, he had became one of the principal brains of the ultranationalist antisemitic movement in the USSR, know as the “Russian Party.”
Evseev’s book carried a subtitle redolent of Marxist clichés: “Truth about contemporary Zionism: Its ideology, practice, and the organizational system of major Jewish bourgeoisie.” On the illustration printed next to the title page, there was a black spider with both a swastika and a Star of David on top of its body; the spider’s web was spread over the West, from the United States to Britain, France and Italy.
Perhaps the vilest of all these tracts was “Caution: Zionism! Essays on the Ideology, Organisation and Practice of Zionism,” a 1970 attack by Yuri Ivanov. (By the way, it was republished by a left-wing group, The November 8th Publishing House, in Toronto in 2024.) The book’s singular achievement was to fit classic antisemitic conspiracy theory into the only philosophical framework permitted in the USSR — the Marxist-Leninist one — and rewrite it as anti-Zionist critique.
“Ivanov managed to supply a strong theoretical foundation for openly criticizing Zionism with the help of Marx’s and Lenin’s works, which no one could argue against,” Vladimir Bolshakov, another prominent “Zionologist,” recalled in his memoirs. I remember coming across it in the late 1970s while writing my PhD dissertation on Jews and Communists, and was shocked by its vituperative language and tone, not to mention falsehoods, worthy of the worst Nazi propaganda.
All of this bore terrible political fruit. On November 10, 1975, the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism. It remains the foundation stone of antisemitic anti-Zionism. It cast Israel, the collective Jew, as committing today’s ultimate crime. Despite being mass-murdered by Nazi racists, Jews became racists. And despite enduring history’s largest genocide, Jews are now accused of “genocide.”
Communist propagandists enjoyed manipulating words to trigger “Pavlovian” responses, the Princeton Kremlinologist Robert Tucker observed; their “ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.”
Much has been written of late about the deep Soviet roots of today’s virulent anti-Zionism in the West. Some thirty-five years after the fall of the Soviet empire, the Soviet corpse continues to emit its infectious gases and poisons people’s minds and imaginations. After 7 October, parts of the Western Left responded not with horror but with slogans lifted from Soviet propaganda: Israel as colonial, Zionism as apartheid, Jews as global oppressors.
Today’s anti-Zionism is not actually concerned with the relationship Jews have with Israel. It is a project centered on producing villains. In this, it follows its predecessors: antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Antisemites were never concerned with the authenticity of Jewish identity, practice, or behaviour; they sought to construct “the Jew” as a monster.
Anti-Zionism repeats this mechanism, simply substituting “the Zionist” for “the Jew,” while inheriting the same foundational hatred. Failing to recognize that anti-Zionism, whose Soviet and Nazi genealogy reveals that it has nothing to do with Jews and their right to self-determination, is fundamentally a project of constructing fiends.
Antisemitism functions not merely as a prejudice but as a moral language, a grammar that shapes how societies explain disorder and assign blame. It provides simplicity where reality is complex and coherence where the world feels incoherent. For such people, it becomes a battle against a uniquely devious and implacable foe – something that cannot be resolved by elections or arguments, but only by confrontation. The logic points beyond persuasion to elimination.
The only way to be anti-Zionist without being an antisemite is to reject the legitimacy of all nation-states equally. The loudest supporters of Palestinian statehood are not doing that. No one should mistake it, or be taken in by those espousing it, for what it is. We should call it, along with antisemitism and anti-Judaism, as “Jew-hatred.” It is nothing more – or less.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
“Kaplan’s Plot” – newly released novel set in Chicago is both historical fiction and psychological drama
Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN I had been searching for a new book this summer that would be of particular interest to Jewish Post readers when I came across the title of a new book that had yet to be released, called “Kaplan’s Plot.” It had received quite a bit of buzz on a number of websites that spotlight books that have – at least in part – a Jewish theme, although it still had not been reviewed when I first read about it.
The plot of the book, as it was described in those initial previews, certainly appealed to me, as it was said to combine a story about a Jewish gangster in Chicago in the early part of the 20th century with a modern day story about a man whose life had come completely unravelled and who was forced to return to Chicago to live with his dying mother.
I’ve been a fan of Jewish gangster stories for years, especially ones written by our own Allan Levine – and I’d often published stories about real life Jewish gangsters – or Jewish gangster fighters – as the case may be, in the pages of The Jewish Post & News (also on jewishpostandnews.ca).
Last year, for instance, I wrote a review of a book called “The Incorruptibles,” about efforts by law-abiding Jews in New York City in the early part of the 20th century to fight corruption. You can read my review here: “The Incorruptibles.”
Also, in the past I’ve run stories about Jewish underworld figures who either lived in Winnipeg or had a strong Winnipeg connection. One of the most popular stories ever to appear on our website, for instance (and which is still being widely viewed), is one that was written by Bill Redekopp – a former writer for the Free Press, who had profiled a fascinating Winnipeg bootlegger by the name of Bill Wolchock in his book, “Crimes of the Century – Manitoba’s Most Notorious True Crimes.” You can read Redekopp’s story about Wolchock at “Bill Wolchock.”
Another story that garnered quite a bit of attention when it was first published was Martin Zeilig’s story about Winnipeg-born Al Smiley, which appeared in the March 29, 2017 issue of The Jewish Post & News. The most interesting tidibt in Martin’s story was that Smiley was was sitting beside the notorious Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel when Siegel was murdered in 1947. That story doesn’t appear as a stand-alone story on our website, but you can find it by downloading the entire March 29, 2017 issue by entering a search through our “Search archive” link for Al Smiley.
One more story that dealt with Manitoba Jewish gangsters (and which also referenced the Bill Wolchock story) was one I wrote in 2023 titled “A deep dive into the lives of some shadier members of our community.” In that story I wrote about a book that was about to be published titled “Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream.” It was the story of Wolf Rabin (born William “Wolfe” Rabinovitch), written by his nephew, David Rabinovitch.
All this serves as a very long winded preamble to a review of “Kaplan’s Plot.” I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the characters in the book are all fictitious, since the mobsters are so vividly drawn – although there are very brief references to real-life mobsters, including Al Capone, Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano, that make you wonder whether some of the other mobsters might also have been real people.
According to information available about the author, Jason Diamond, this is his very first novel – a very impressive debut. He certainly brings to life a very nasty Chicago in the early part of the 20th century.
What makes what Diamond has written an even more admirable achievement is that the plot works both as a riveting mystery and as a thoughtful examination of a mother and son relationship.
The story alternates between a story set in modern day Chicago (in 2023) and another story that begins in Odesa in Ukraine in 1909, but soon moves to Chicago shortly thereafter.
At first, we read about a character by the name of Elijah Mendes, who has just returned to Chicago from the Bay area, where a business venture in which he was involved has collapsed. Elijah’s mother, Eve, is dying from cancer, but she certainly retains enough strength to carry on with quite a few activities – enabled by her constant puffing on a vape pen. Eve, it turns out, has been a very accomplished poetess during her life and, although she and her late husband Peter were financially quite comfortable, she scoffs at what she regards as Elijah’s obsession with material pursuits.
Eve doesn’t pay much attention to mundane day to day matters, including opening the mail, but when Elijah discovers a series of letters from something called the Hebrew Benevolent Society, his curiosity is piqued and he sets out do discover what those letters are all about.
The chapters alternate between modern and older Chicago, as we are introduced to the Kaplan brothers – Yitzhak and Solomon or, as they come to be known in America – Itz and Sol. The brothers have narrowly escaped a pogrom in Odesa when their parents were able to secure passage for them on a boat destined for Hamburg. Eventually they find themselves on a ship sailing to America, where they make the acquaintance of a character by the name of Hershey.
Hershey tells the boys that he can help them find a place to live in Chicago, where he introduces them to Avi who, it turns out, is a major figure in the Jewish underworld there.
Diamond provides a rich description of what life was like in Chicago back in the day when the city was divided among different ethnic groups who held sway over their own respective territories and when it was dangerous to cross over into the wrong part of town.
As the story develops, we learn that Elijah is actually the grandson of Itz Kaplan, but knows nothing about his grandfather’s very shady past – beyond having been told that he was a “businessman.” When he goes to the building housing the Hebrew Benevolent Society, however, he finds out that there is an entirely new aspect to his family’s past – which leads to his wanting to probe deeply into his family’s history.
Elijah’s own demons – including past drug addiction, a failed marriage, and a deep insecurity about his own ability to succeed in business, come to the fore, but his mother’s refusal to discuss her family’s history haunts him even further.
As the book moves in parallel tracks between two time periods we find out more about Itz Kaplan – and just how malevolent a character he was. And, at the same time as Elijah learns more about Itz, he begins to better understand why his relationship with his mother had gone off the rails.
The mystery of what happened to Itz’s brother, Sol, about whom Elijah had not even known had existed, figures into both stories – the one set in early 20th century Chicago, and the one set in modern Chicago, as Elijah tries to get his mother to open up about her family.
Jason Diamond provides wonderful descriptions of some of the minutiae of Jewish life back in the day when keeping kosher was an essential element of Jewish life. Sol, for instance, is a butcher (something that his father was as well back in Odesa) and maintains a rigid observance of all Jewish laws. He is fastidious about adhering to the quite complex details of butchering meat according to the laws of kashrut, for instance.
Itz, in contrast, who has been deeply emotionally scarred by what he saw happen during the pogrom in Odesa, is totally indifferent to Jewish laws. At the same time though, the reader might develop a grudging admiration for just how cleverly Itz is able to navigate the jungle of the Chicago underworld. That’s why I began this review by referring to other Jewish crime figures – all of whom existed. While we might be repelled by their behaviour, we are often fascinated by the cleverness they exhibited in maneuvering through the almost constant danger that manifested their lives. And – it was knowing that they were living on a knife’s edge that often seemed to motivate them as they stared danger in the face.
Ultimately, Diamond brings it all home. The mystery behind Eve’s family is solved and there is some closure to the relationship between Elijah and Eve.
A truly absorbing story – although just released in September, “Kaplan’s Plot” has already garnered many positive reviews. One review on Goodreads, I note however, says that the reviewer is sick of “mob stories.” I suppose it’s quite evident that I’m a big fan of mob stories that have a Jewish element and, if you are a fan of that genre then “Kaplan’s Plot” is sure to capture your fancy. I’m not sure I’d recommend it as a Chanukah gift for the grandchildren, however – unless one of your grandchildren has aspirations of becoming a mobster.
“Kaplan’s Plot”
by Jason Diamond
Flatiron Books
320 pages
Published September, 2025