About a decade ago, the organization where I worked launched a rotating authors’ blog in partnership with Jewish Book Council. One of our early wonders — a little glimmer that whispered in our ears, You’re doing something right—was the work of author and cartoonist Ken Krimstein, who drew original content all week.
Krimstein’s latest project, Einstein in Kafkaland, is a whimsical, thoughtful story whose lyricism will grab readers at unexpected moments. It centers on the physicist Albert Einstein, who himself is occasionally guilty of spouting unexpected poetry, and, to a lesser extent, on the writer Franz Kafka.
In 1911, Einstein, then a young math professor, was only a little bit famous — well-known enough to arouse the criticism of other mathematicians, but not enough to guarantee him a steady income to provide for his three children. He was also full of a potential he hadn’t quite seized yet. Although he was on his way to solidifying his theory of general relativity, he was also up against a lack of confidence in the face of existing notions of what physics could and couldn’t do, a general rootlessness, and his own galactically deep thoughts.
What’s remarkable about Krimstein’s biographical meditation is that it’s structured not around the events of Einstein’s life, but around his thoughts. It’s like watching someone at a party zoning out, nodding off, escaping into their head — but here, we actually get to keep watching the inside-their-head parts. Kafka’s smaller role, as an insurance salesman who happens to meet Einstein, is less developed, and less volatile, but feels like an appropriate cameo. So, for that matter, does the cloaked figure of Death, who carries us through the strange and delightful chronicle of what’s known as Einstein’s lost year — only, Einstein has never been so vivid as he is inside this story.
