Dancing with Einstein by Kate Wenner

In this haunting and engaging novel by Kate Wenner, we meet 30-year old Marea Hoffman as she sorts out her complicated childhood and attempts to settle into an adult life. After graduating from Barnard and traveling the world for seven years, Marea lands in New York City hoping to find some peace and permanence.

Marea visits four therapists: a Freudian, a Jungian, a political psychologist, and a general psychotherapist. Wenner’s one-woman jury on the efficacy of therapy does not reach a verdict, but it is fascinating to observe the process. That Marea has carried the weight of her family’s burden is never in doubt by any of her therapists. The therapists offer Marea four approaches for excavating her life and she in turn reveals four different versions of herself. Through the combination of these experiences and her openness to self-analysis, Marea begins to engage and understand the feelings she has spent her life avoiding.

When Marea was twelve years old, Jonas, her scientist father, died in a car crash after he dropped her off at school. Uncertainty lurks in Marcea’s mind. Was it an accident or suicide? She attempts to study that ride to school with her kind and gentle father frame by frame, like watching a film in slow motion. She also remembers the tension and fighting in her family’s home in Princeton, New Jersey where her father now worked after designing the detonators for the nuclear bomb dropped at Hiroshima. Marcea’s mother was a committed Quaker and opposed his involvement in such violent pursuits.

Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheim make cameo appearances as they wrestle with the moral implications of their destructive creation. A light moment in an otherwise heavy life is when Jonas’s new colleague, Albert Einstein, shares Sunday dinner with the Hoffman family. On those evenings there is joy, music, and lightness in the Hoffman home. 

Marea is a sensitive young girl who has recurring nightmares about nuclear holocaust. Or is she dreaming a vision of her father’s trauma?  Her Dad speaks little of his life in Vienna, but one day at their Quaker meeting he stands and says, “I do what you all despise me for – because God made both good and evil. You ridiculous people who do not believe that the Russians are our enemies will go to your slaughter like sheep, like my own father and mother, both murdered for the crime of being Jews.” Jonas does not seek to hurt people by participating in the country's nuclear program. He simply believes Einstein and his wife are naïve to the evils of the world.

After a seven-year absence, Marea returns to visit her mother in Princeton. In attempting to reconnect with her only child, Ginny Hoffman shares her husband’s letters with Marea, which leads to a new level of understanding between the mother and daughter. This adds another dimension to the forces shaping Marea, but one that is less well developed and thus less convincing.

Wenner’s novel is dark, compelling, and fascinating. How could it not be? She explores both the moral musings of scientists about the development and use of the atomic bomb and the varied and complex approaches of psychologists in understanding the human psyche.  An excellent read.