Our frequent correspondent, Herbert Halsegger, notes the following amusing article (in German) about the chess master Arnold Schottländer and his amusing game against "Gustav the Crusher," a coffee-house player, which ended in a nice queen sacrifice:
Inter alia, the article has a photo of Schottländer's grave, with the statement, "his body was weak, but his spirit was strong."
Smyslov in 1977. Credit: Wikipedia.
In Genna Sosonko's Smyslov on the Couch, brought to my attention by Ilan Rubin and Terje Kristiansen, we read (pp. 30-31):
I’ve always been received with the utmost respect, no matter where I’ve gone, be it Israel or the Arab world. I don’t get too worked up over those ethnic matters. One time, I got a call from the compilers of the Jewish Encyclopedia; they were putting together a list of famous Jews. They asked me the same question about my mother. I answered it the way I always do: ‘Seems like I have some Jewish blood, but I can’t say for sure.’ They said, ‘if you don’t know for sure, then we can’t include you on the list.’ Unlike Botvinnik, I have no reason to take pride in my heritage. But you know, Genna, none of this evser really interested me anyway.”
Let’s stop dwelling on the 7th world chess champion’s ethnic background. That isn’t the point. Neither is Boris Spassky sometimes calling him by and mispronouncing his patronymic, “Vasilievich, Vasilievich, what a smart Jewish mind you have!” when the two of them analyzed positions together. Nor is Smyslov asking Neishtadt: “Could you buy me two mezuzahs, Yakov? I don’t feel comfortable buying them myself,” when he went to Israel. Nor even is the fact that he looked like a biblical prophet, straight out of a Rembrandt painting, during the last few years of his life.
This all seems straightforward: Smyslov might have had some Jewish ancestry, as he himself acknowledged, but didn't consider himself Jewish, and wasn't particularly interested in the issue either way. Case closed.
However, why would Smyslov, in that case, ask Neishtadt to buy him two mezuzahs? A mezuzhah - literally, "doorpost" - is a piece of parchment of certain sections of the Torah, put in a small cylindrical case, which Jews put on the doors of their houses. It would very likely not be bought by anyone who is not Jewish or perhaps wants to give it to close Jewish relatives. A mezuzah would be perfectly useless for a non-Jew and would not be bought just because one has Jewish ancestry. It is also by no means a typical souvenir or gift one would buy on a visit to the holy land. Therefore, if someone is buying a mezuzah, let alone two, it is likely they either consider themselves Jewish - or have close Jewish friends or relatives - and want to fix a mezuzah in their door.
Is this absolute proof Smyslov was, so to speak, more Jewish than he admitted to publicly? No: if nothing else, Smyslov might have been buying the mezuzahs at the request of Jewish friends back home who were not related to him. But it should also be noted, in favor of the claim that Smyslov was Jewish that, unlike Sosonko's other examples - all of which are examples of other people claiming Smyslov is Jewish, or asking if he is - here we have Smyslov himself acting in a "Jewish" way.
It is known that Alekhine had planned to visit Palestine in his world tour of 1931/2, as noted for example here, to give only a post from this blog. Now, Terje Kristiansen notifies me that Sergey Voronkov had notified him that the complete details why Alekhine cancelled his visit to Palestine (and some other places) were given by Alekhine himself upon his return to Paris, as noted in the Poslednie Novosti of 4 July 1933:
It was terribly hot in the Dutch Indies. I stayed there for three weeks and gave 12 exhibitions. Long journeys on stuffy, dirty trains. And it was this, not the playing, that tired me. Worse, I learned something I'd never experienced before. I completely lost sleep. Java and Sumatra had left me in such a state that the doctor who examined me demanded that I interrupt my tour and, above all, rest. “I did just that, and although I stopped in Colombo, Bombay, Egypt, it was as a tourist, without playing anywhere…”
This, and the fact that Alekhine cancelled not just his Palestine stop but others as well, is some evidence that Alekhine was not an ideological antisemite, at least not during that time.
Indeed, Johannes Fischer suggests - based on the extensive work of Christian Rohrer - that one of Alekhine's major motivations to cooperate with the Nazis is to retain his position at the top of the chess world. In particular, Rohrer notes that Alekhine was also a member of the Freemasons, in fact a member of the same Paris lodge as Ossip Bernstein. It goes without saying that both the Jews (like Bernstein) and the Freemasons were deeply hated by the Nazis.
When the evidence is so conflicting, one should do well to follow Edward Winter's advice, quoted in "Was Alekhine a Nazi?" that "a good historian knows when to be a waverer." Still, on balance I (tentatively) agree with Rohrer.
