While Mitza tries to keep her family together after Albert co-opts her theories and publishes under his own name, intentionally denying her whatever recognition she would be entitled to, Albert becomes an abuser and an adulterer – an all-around not nice guy.

Benedict’s portrayal of Albert as a conniving, manipulative genius is marvelous. Only after Mitza and Albert become what he tells her is “ein stein” – one stone, and Mitza partners with Albert on a theory of relativity which was her vision, does Albert’s academic career take off – at Mitza’s expense. Mitza, now pregnant with their child, abandons her education. And so their relationship begins to develop they fall in love, they plan to marry, but Einstein can’t find a job. Why, Mitza asks, would he be interested in a dark-haired Serb with a limp? Well, he is. One of her classmates is Albert Einstein, who takes an immediate interest in her. Mitza, a physicist-in-training, is a math genius who seeks to find a unifying explanation for how the world works. Elsa, as she insisted we call her, continued regardless.Mitza Marič is a brilliant young woman whose family struggles to get her accepted into and excel at Zurich’s elite Polytechnic, one of the few institutions of higher learning admitting women in the late 1890s. Her audacity coming here, seeking out the woman she’d betrayed, silenced me. Staring at the ruby-red smile painted upon her lips, I couldn’t speak.

Albert had sent her over to the hotel to “assist” us without my foreknowledge. Einstein, allow me to help you,” Elsa had said with an obsequious smile when the boys and I went to Berlin alone in the days after Christmas to find an apartment. Less because she had “stolen” Albert from me and more because of her perfidy. The very thought of Elsa-all perfumed and dyed blond hair, exactly the sort of idle, pampered, bourgeois woman about which Albert used to complain-sickened me. And that was precisely who would greet him at the door when he returned from his cowardly flight to his lover, Elsa. If Albert didn’t appreciate the meek helpmate I had become in our latter years together-the failed physicist from whom he could pilfer ideas at will and the wife bendable at his beckoning-he positively loathed the return of the old Mileva in Berlin. I would not endure humiliation at Albert’s hands again, whether personal or professional.

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