Sailing a small boat confidently takes knowledge of how tides and currents, winds and waves can shape your course.
So who would have been better than Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the 20th century, at piloting a small boat — his 17-foot craft, the Tinef (Yiddish, for junk) — in the waters around Long Island Sound?
It turns out that the creator of the Theory of Relativity wasn’t a very good sailor, and had to be rescued numerous times, as Steve Israel writes in his compelling new spy thriller, The Einstein Conspiracy.
In August, 1935, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined: “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein; He runs his sailboat aground at Old Lyme.”
Einstein’s sailing problem is far from the only part of Steve Israel’s new book that is based in fact. There really were plots by the Nazis to kill Einstein; there was a substantial pro-Nazi movement in 1930s America, including Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, where one street was named after Adolph Hitler.
Crucially, Einstein not only sailed in the waters around Nassau Point on Long Island’s north fork. It was there that he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that the Nazis were working on the physics involved in creating a uniquely powerful bomb. That gave FDR the impetus to launch the Manhattan Project that developed atomic weapons.
As Steve notes on the back cover of the book, he is the only member of Congress to retire to open an independent bookstore, Theodore’s, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. In my conversation with Steve, he explains how running a bookstore influenced the writing of his new book. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
