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154. From Maurice Solovine
Paris, 39 Blvd. de Port-Royal, 20 June 1921
Dear Einstein,
Roughly 15 days ago I sent you a registered letter to the address of Mr. Davies
in London, in which I asked you kindly to send me the lectures delivered in Amer-
ica and London so that I can translate them into French before my trip to America.
For I am considering going there toward the end of July. Since I haven’t received
anything from you, I have to assume either that the letter was not handed over to
you or that owing to an overloaded schedule you did not have the time to reply to
me.
That is why I ask you most sincerely again to forward the lectures to me so that
I can commence the translation. There is a strong demand here for your translated
books. It will soon be necessary to arrange for a new edition of your lecture on the
ether and relativity
theory.[1]
Local intellectuals are becoming more and more inter-
ested in your new ideas. They now feel more at home with the new formal struc-
tures and I hope that they don’t want to get in over their heads in it.
That contemptible Fabre now had to make do with omitting what he first gave
out as a foreword from you in the new edition of his
book.[2]
In its place, however,
he printed a sort of introduction in which he made the nastiest statements about
you. He thought you had renounced your own ideas and declared furthermore that
if admiration was due you as a physicist, one would still have to pass a different
judgment about you as a person. What do you say to that scoundrel? We have now
resolved, I and a few friends, to give him a good dressing down in a local periodical.
For this purpose we would need to have the protest in hand that you published in
the scientific
weekly[3]
and some more very precise information about the true state
of affairs. Did he just reprint your letter as a foreword without asking your permis-
sion to do so, or did he forge the letters outright as well? Because no voices have
been raised here against his base assertions, the local public might think he is in the
right. That is why we want to correct him in public.
Dear Einstein, during your travels in America, where you reaped great and legit-
imate triumphs, you surely made the acquaintance of many influential personali-
ties. I am having unspeakable difficulties obtaining the sum required for my trip to
America. If after all this unspeakable effort I do manage, I shall have to work for 2
or 3 years to pay off the money I am borrowing everywhere. Since I am, as you
know, well versed in philosophy as well as in the Greek language and literature,
wouldn’t it be possible for you to recommend me to a Jewish group in America so
that I could deliver a few lectures on these subjects there? The honorarium that