ALBERT EINSTEIN was not only the greatest scientist of his time but also by far the most famous. Moreover, he answered letters. And it is this combination that makes the present book possible.
Unlike our previous book, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel, this one is not a biography and does not explain Einstein’s ideas. It has no chapters, no table of contents, no index, and, at first glance, no plan or structure. It consists, for the most part, of quotations from hitherto unpublished letters and the like that Einstein wrote without thought of publication. There is no need to describe them further here since they speak eloquently for themselves.
Some of the items were sent out in impeccable English, and these we have quoted verbatim. Other items were issued in less idiomatic English, and in presenting them we have made occasional minor changes while preserving the Germanic flavor that gives them charm. All other items are presented in English translation. Often an item that was issued in English was based on a German draft that still exists, and in such cases we have given the English version that was actually sent instead of making an independent translation.
Einstein was an artist not only in his science, which had a transcendent beauty, but also in his use of words. In the latter part of this book, therefore, we have included the original German versions or German drafts, whenever available, so that the reader acquainted with the language can savor Einstein’s prose at first hand.
The quest for peace was an important part of Einstein’s life. Indeed, a whole book, Einstein on Peace (New York, Schocken Books) has been devoted to the subject, and so thorough is its coverage that hardly a scrap of unpublished material on the topic was left over for us to quote. Therefore, for details of this facet of Einstein we refer the reader to that book. We have, however, quoted a lengthy item from the book. Its inclusion has a twofold justification: it is a powerful statement in its own right with a special publication status: and its presence has a symbolic significance as a token salute to all the other items in Einstein on Peace that we were sorely tempted to republish here.
The order of presentation of the items is not haphazard. It is akin to that of crowding recollections of a rich life, each sequence apt to take unexpected turns as memory, with a logic all its own, leaps from remembrance to linked remembrance back and forth over the years. In this book there are several such sequences, their starts usually indicated by a more pronounced gap than usual between items. Each item may be taken by itself. But the book is intended to be read as a whole: it offers a seemingly rambling sightseeing journey whose cumulative effect, we hope, will be a deeper and richer understanding of Einstein the man.
For those who would like a road map, we have included a brief Einstein chronology at the end of the book.
