Interregnum

G. K. Chesterton, from wikipedia.

"I have nothing to write except an apology for not writing..."  -- G. K. Chesterton, Government and the Rights of Man.

Having been more or less criminally negligent (for personal reasons) in updating this blog, it is interesting to note that I have partners in crime. In the 1940s Mandatory Palestine, there also was a long interregnum where there was little, if any, chess content published. When it came to magazines, apart from a few false starts and some books, there had been no national magazine from the 1930s (Ha'Sachmat, 1935/6, 2 issues) to the 1950s (64 Mishbatzot, 1956/7, 13 issues) : in both cases, started and edited by Moshe Czerniak.

Newspapers had the same problem. In the 1930s, as we noticed, it was Moshe Marmorosh who was the #1 reporter, producing weekly, or at least bi-weekly, columns for the two most important newspapers in the country, Ha'aretz and Davar. Yet his literary contributions to both papers had tapered off in the early 40s; the latest column edited by Marmorosh I could find in Davar was from June 8th, 1940, and in Haaretz from July 25th, 1941, and the column in Ha'aretz was only published very occasionally for about a year before that.

While there was occasional chess content in both papers later on, especially reports on tournaments' results and the occasional game, a regular column was only re-established in Davar on Nov. 22th, 1946 (i.e., after the war), as part of their sports page in the new weekly supplement, Davar Ha'Sahvua ('Davar this Week', published on Fridays). It was edited (as is explicitly first stated on Feb 7th, 1947, column) by Shaul Hon. An even longer interregnum -- more than a decade! -- occurred in Ha'aretz, where the new column, edited by Czerniak, appeared on June 5th, 1953. Here, it was not only that (two) wars had to end -- WWII and Israel's war of independence -- but also Czerniak had to return to Israel from South America, where he had been living since the 1939 Olympiad. He did so in the early 50s.