Einstein, Cast Aside and Tossed in a Closet

The acclaimed photojournalist Lotte Jacobi’s iconic shot of the theoretical physicist winds up unceremoniously stashed in a midtown Manhattan apartment—until it’s finally retrieved

By Ian Strasfogel

August 13, 2024

My wife and I recently decided to sell the one valuable photograph we possess–a small signed print of Albert Einstein, taken in 1938–six years after he emigrated to the United States. You may know it; it’s been reproduced countless times. It shows the great theoretical physicist in his Princeton study, seated on a tall chair, surrounded by books, wearing his weathered leather jacket (a major style in the 1930s), buttoned up to the neck, his gaze pensive, dreamy, maybe even a bit wary.

I found the picture decades ago, when I was cleaning out my parents’ cramped apartment shortly after placing my widowed father in a nursing facility–and it puzzled me. Mom and Dad weren’t wealthy collectors or connoisseurs of modern photography. How did they come to own such a formidable and beautiful object–one that was signed by its photographer, Lotte Jacobi, an émigré herself who’d been friends with Einstein when they both lived in Berlin in the earlier interwar years? Why didn’t my parents ever display that photo?

I’ve been able to unravel the mystery only now, thanks to the Internet and the sharp memory of my younger brother, Andrew.

You may have heard of Lotte Jacobi. The Internet is full of articles about her and her incisive portraiture. Born in 1896 in Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family of photographers (her grandfather had studied with Louis Daguerre, no less, that early master of the medium), she moved to Berlin in 1927, where she took over her family’s studio and rapidly became famous for stunning images of the city’s artistic elite–stars like the director Max Reinhardt, the actress and singer Lotte Lenya, and her composer husband Kurt Weill. And it was in Berlin that Jacobi met and became friends with the German-born Einstein, who was then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and a professor at the University of Berlin.

Jacobi was so skilled and prominent that when the Nazis came to power and began their systematic persecution of Germany’s Jews, Herman Goering’s culture ministry offered her the title of “honorary Aryan,” allowing her to remain in Berlin (despite Jacobi being Jewish herself) and to chronicle “the triumphs” of Hitler’s dictatorship. Very much to her credit, she refused and, with her teenage son, fled to the United States in 1935. (Einstein had already renounced his German citizenship in 1933, when he moved to the U.S.)

But it was never easy for refugees to establish themselves in this new country. Much like Jacobi, my Polish-born father, Ignace Strasfogel, also based in Weimar-era Berlin, escaped the Nazis early on. He met and married my American-born mother a short while after he arrived here. Their early years together were hard. The disastrous after-effects of the Depression were widely felt, work was intermittent, and money frighteningly scarce.

After much struggle, my father’s luck changed, and he became the official pianist of the New York Philharmonic. That new position propelled him into this city’s artistic stratosphere, by then crowded with fellow refugees from Hitler’s Germany. The pianist Arthur Schnabel, the conductor Otto Klemperer, the violinist Joseph Szigeti, and the director Max Reinhardt were among those who regularly visited my parents in their tiny penthouse apartment on West 54th Street. Perhaps it was Reinhardt who introduced them to Jacobi; she had made many portraits of him during their glory days in Berlin.

Famous though my parents’ guests had been back in Germany, they were all laboring to adjust to their New York reality. Lotte Jacobi must have had it especially hard. Freelance photography was a difficult profession anywhere, and she had arrived here as a single mother, raising a son. My mother, as the wife of a refugee, was deeply sympathetic to Jacobi’s plight and eager to help her thrive in the American free-for-all.

An opportunity to do so arose in a family outing with an older couple, the Buchers. Dr. Walter Bucher, a distinguished American-born geologist and paleontologist, had been a colleague of my uncle Clarence, Mom’s brother, when they were both teaching at the University of Cincinnati. After the elderly scientist moved to New York to join the Columbia University faculty, Mom and Dad, with me and my little brother tagging along, started taking Sunday excursions with him and his wife. I well remember the stout, white-haired gentleman as he repeatedly interrupted our walks to expound on natural phenomena. (I was only seven or eight at the time and not especially receptive to lengthy lectures on the intricacies of geological stratification.)

During one of those expeditions, my mother learned that the Buchers’ daughter was about to get married. Her parents wanted her wedding to be a great occasion and had arranged for the festivities to be held in Riverside Church. They hadn’t yet found a suitable photographer. Possibly, Mom might know of one?

She did indeed. Well aware of how difficult things were for Jacobi, Mom did her new friend a mitzvah–that Hebrew term for a good deed. She told the Buchers that a great photographer happened to be free on the day of their daughter’s wedding. True, Jacobi didn’t come cheap, but she was highly esteemed–and had recently published a photo essay on the great Albert Einstein for Life Magazine–the holy grail of American photojournalism. The picture of Einstein, retrieved from my parents’ apartment, is from that series–though ironically Life rejected it. It seems the editors found the image of him in his worn leather jacket too natural, and insufficiently great.

My mother’s sales pitch worked. Lotte Jacobi was hired as the Buchers’ wedding photographer. That must have been the moment when Jacobi gave my parents that Einstein portrait–as a heartfelt thanks for arranging a much-needed, and well-paid, assignment for her.

The big day arrived. Our parents were among the hundreds of guests who assembled for the grand occasion. Mom told my brother and me how Jacobi scampered from aisle to aisle, taking shot after shot, as the ceremony unfolded. During the reception, she even crouched behind the carved ice swan for a better view of the guests scarfing down their canapes.

If only this story had ended as hopefully as it began. If only Mom’s mitzvah had panned out.

A few days after the grand event, Jacobi called our mother in despair. She had forgotten to remove the camera’s lens cap–so there were no pictures at all. Mom’s reaction was rather curious: she found this blunder, this calamity, funny–and dined out on the story for months. Even as a kid, I felt her amusement at Lotte Jacobi’s misfortune was harsh and off-key.

Jacobi was surely mortified at what she had done. She had deeply embarrassed herself just at the moment when she was desperate to start her own New York studio. The Buchers, of course, were furious. They dropped our family and never visited again. Neither did Lotte Jacobi.

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

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