Mr. Halsegger, in his deep dive through old American chess magazines, also notes the following rare (for the time) report of an Israeli game - from the Israeli championship of 1956 - in the foreign press. The game Dobkin - Czerniak (0:1).
Our frequent correspondent Herbert Halsegger notes an article from a Jewish magazine for politics and culture about the chess boom in Israel in 2012 when Boris Gelfand played for the world championship with Viswanathan Anand.
This made us think about previous chess "booms." The recent one due to The Queen's Gambit is well known (and still ongoing) and so was the Fischer boom in the USA after Fischer won the world championship in 1972.
Are there any other examples of such "booms" in history? Did chess, for example, become noticeably more popular after the first international chess tournament, London, 1851?
The story goes that in 1923 Marcel Duchamp finally abandoned his “hilarious picture” of psychosexually contorted glass and wire, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, to spend more time playing chess. He was certainly obsessed with the austere beauty of the game, famously pronouncing that “while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” For most of us, however, if we are minded to consider the aesthetic value of games at all, it is usually only in a derivative sense. We can appreciate the Art Deco elegance of Duchamp’s own custom-made chess set, for instance, without sharing his passion for obscure variations on opening d4.
"The Story goes." "Famously pronouncing." "Obscure variations on opening d4." Why is it that books or articles that mention chess are so often lacking in accuracy and sources?
Biographical articles about chess players by other players are, of course, very common, but Herbert Halsegger notes an interesting example. Not only are both the subject and author Jewish - which is hardly surprising in chess! - but the author of the article about Edward Lasker is a female master, namely the Jewish Mona Karff. We should note that as we mentioned elsewhere, Edward Lasker had, in the same year, visited the chess olympiad in Haifa, 1976.
