Chess Poem

 

Source: see below

The same book mentioned in the previous post, Eliahu Shahaf's Israel Chess Championship 1961/62, also has a chess poem by H. Ben Shlomo on p. 104. The readers of this blog have done nothing to deserve a translation of this poem, although, to judge by the scenes described, it is not a poem about this tournament, but about the Amsterdam Olympiad, 1954. 

The poem mentions in particular the game Botvinnik - Porat and the international scene, and the claim that the whole Olympiad was really an "internal Jewish battle," despite the various flags, due to the large number of Jews on the leading teams. The poem ends with the claim that the prize "stayed in the family": that is, with the USSR team, three of whose players (Botvinnik, Bronstein and Geller) were Jews. Perhaps the author also believed that Smyslov was also Jewish.