Sunday, January 18, 2015

Czerniak "Censorship"? -- Updated: No.

Van Amerongen's ex liberis. The quote is from Zecharia 4:6: 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit'. Photo credit: www.chessgraphics.net. which credits it to Jean Buchet, writing in L'Echiquier deParis in a series of articles from 1947 to 1953.
From the same article by Fasher quoted below, an interesting claim: Van Amerongen's book, 133 Traps in the Openings [133 Mal'kodot Ba'Ptichot, Mofet: Tel Aviv, 1958] 'only has 132 traps (since one trap had caught the editor [of Mofet's chess books], who was Moshe Czerniak).'

Does anybody have a copy and can verify? Also, what trap did Czerniak, if this is correct, "censor"?

Edited 5/2/2015: a reader informs me that the book does, in fact, have 133 traps -- just as said on the cover -- so the story about Czerniak's "censorship" is probably untrue. 

This makes sense, as Czerniak was not known as a "censor" of his defeats or for trying to make himself look invincible. Indeed, he himself published some of his defeats on various occasions, for example to Sonja Graf or to Capablanca (C. N. 5074). 

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