BOOKS

Broken Colors follows the life of Sophie Marks as she moves along a colorful path toward artistic and personal fulfillment. Streaked with moments of passion, heartbreak, and longing, Sophie’s journey takes her from World War II England, to post-war Paris and the Italian countryside, the American southwest, and back to England where she comes face to face with hidden memories.

Published by Riverhead, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, 1999. Paperback, published by The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, 2000 What happened to Einstein's Daughter? Did she die of the scarlet fever mentioned in Einstein's last letter about her? If so, why is there no death certificate–or even birth certificate? Was she adopted, as some scholars have contended? If so, why was there not even a whisper of her in any of the mythology that proliferated around one of our century's most legendary figures? And why, so many years later, were those close to the Einstein and Maric families still reluctant tp speak about her? After five years of travel to Serbian villages wracked by years of strife, painstaking forays into the labyrinth of Central European record-keeping, and hundreds of kitchen-table conversations; after following every lead and every flicker of intuition, and with the support of an international network of women, Michele Zackheim has answered the question of what became of Liserl Einstein Maric.

Published by Riverhead, a division of G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1996. Paperback published by The Berkley Group, New York, 1997 What drove Violette Leduc to sacrifice her most private self for public consumption and the frail promise of fame it might bring? An American woman – a visual artist from the Southwest – acts on unarticulated feelings of kinship with Leduc and retraces the writer's life, traveling through Paris and the French countryside, in a effort to come to terms with her own life's journey.

Published by Admiral Books. Belgrade, Serbia, 2012.

Published by Verlaghaus Goethestrasse GmbH & Co. K.G. Munchen, 1999.
BROKEN COLORS

I loved Broken Colors, it went into my heart and stayed there.
—Vanessa Redgrave

A profoundly original,
beautifully written
work, so emotionally
accurate that it tears
at the heart. I read
it without stopping.
—Gerald Stern


EINSTEIN'S DAUGHTER

"Get inspired by this incredible woman's words - a must read."
--Glamour

"Surprising . . . intriguing."
--Time

"Absorbing . . . What emerges along the way is a vivid impression of the grim landscape into which Einstein cast this innocent."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Well-written and riveting."
--Library Journal

"Ironically, although Einstein decried "political witch-hunting," physicists have prepared a stake for Zackheim, a talented and courageous writer who independently peered into the wardrobe of the twentieth century's scientific lion. Her book is essential reading for historians of science."
--Lewis Pyenson, Isis (University of Chicago Press)

"Outright fascinating . . . is the profile that emerges of the . . . man whose science made us undestand the world in a new way."
--New York Daily News

". . . when she gets to the actual investigation, she can report on Serbian in 1995 as professional journalists do not."
--The Atlantic Monthly


VIOLETTE'S EMBRACE

"Zackheim gracefully tells Leduc's sensational story through a personal prism that neither enhances not diminishes its great literary and historical interest and appeal."
--The Boston Globe

"Michele Zackheim has written herself into Violette's Leduc's embrace by weaving--with the heightened visual perceptions of the artist she is--a fascinating veil that blurs our views of autobiography, fiction, nonfiction and liminal lands in between. The book is a leisurely, lyrical account of two writers' lives that brings us closer to our own."
--Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art

"Like a long candlelit night in a Parisian cafe . . . an intriguing read."
--Gretel Ehrlich

"This is a story of dignified pursuits, of efforts that in the end are rewarding, of interests that, when pursued, make life richer than it was before."
--Los Angeles Times

"Violette's Embrace is an adventure in time, in place. In personae, Michele Zackheim has dared to invent and actually become part of her story -- the result is a thrilling mix of fact and fiction."
--Kate Millett

"This book is honest, deeeply moving, and politically astute. It has been a long time since a work has so compelled my attention or brought me so completely to Paris, a city I have lived in and loved well."
--Shari Benstock, author of Women of the Left Bank

Lili's nightly stories of Violette's life, the 'embrace' of Paris and Leduc's contemporaries - de Beauvoir, Sartre, Cocteau, and Genet -- become palable to the reader."
--Publishers Weekly

It took a patient investigator to travel back in time to the lost worlds of imperious Simone and her acolyte Violette. and a novelist's imagination to re-create it. Michele Zackheim proves with Violette's Embrace that she is eminently qualified to fill both roles."
--Herbert Lottman, author of Albert Camus: A Biography, Flauber: A Biography, and The Left Bank