Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport Page 4
Like me, Vera also struggled with these issues, never completely solving them.
“In chess it is far better to err on the side of overconfidence than underconfidence,” as Grandmaster Gregory Kaidanov told me in a training session. The danger in being overconfident is that a player will not scrutinize her weaknesses closely enough, but underconfidence is even more perilous because a player risks being paralyzed, playing slowly, and/or shying away from critical variations. Women who show brazen self-confidence are sometimes criticized for behavior that would be seen as normal for boys. After a quick victory, talented eighteen-year-old junior champion from Georgia Nana Dzagnidze glowed with self-assurance. “She won in twenty moves with black and thinks she is a great player,” one spectator noted, puffing out his chest with an exaggerated look of arrogance, “and now she is walking around like a man.”
Vera was often too passive against strong opposition. Chess writer Reuben Fine used a particularly uninspiring showing by Menchik against World Champion Jose Capablanca to criticize her for not paying attention to the maxim “When playing for a draw, play for a win!” Vera played against Capablanca nine times, losing each and every game. In one of these games, held in Hastings in 1930, Vera seemed particularly determined to hold Capablanca to a draw (nobody wins, each player earns half a point). She traded off all the pieces, hoping that Capablanca would not have enough firepower left to defeat her. However, he calmly converted his small advantage into a win. Vera’s spineless strategy was ineffective.
Against weaker players, Vera was much more aggressive, often showing off a tactical flair. In a match game against Sonja Graf, Vera Menchik placed a Rook on an empty square. Sonja took it with her Queen, and Vera sacrificed her own Queen. The game was over. If Sonja accepted this second sacrifice, she would be mated instantly. The brilliant combination is still published in tactic books around the world.
Vera was the first woman to play consistently, and sometimes defeat, the best players in the world. She may have exceeded the standards of her time by an even larger margin if she had used against men the fearless, confident style she exhibited against women.
Vera Menchik’s nearest female rival was Sonja Graf. Sonja was born in December 1908 in Munich, Germany. (She claimed that her birthdate was 1914, and historians repeated this date as gospel. However, her passport was recently unearthed in Germany and it seems she was lying about her age!) A copious source for details of Sonja’s life is the hundreds of pages from her two books. Impressions of a Woman Chessplayer deals mainly with Sonja’s chess career and concepts of the game. The second is a memoir, recalling Sonja’s life in and outside of chess. This autobiographical account focuses on a character “Susann,” whom Sonja reveals to be herself by titling the book I Am Susann.3 This tactic allowed for a more self-aggrandizing tone, evident by glancing at the book cover, in which a muscular woman with clenched fists stands victoriously on top of the globe.
According to I Am Susann, Sonja had a traumatic childhood. Her parents were both from wealthy White Russian (Belarusian) families. Her father was a priest in Russia, but when he fell in love with Sonja’s mother, the two eloped to Munich, Germany, where Sonja’s father became a painter—moderately successful, but never earning enough to feed his large family. While Sonja respected her father’s artistic talent, she abhorred his sentimental but selfish character, telling how “an injured parrot brought tears to his eyes, but he had no sympathy for his hungry children.” She pitied and disliked her mother, a woman Sonja saw as confined to the home and blindly devoted to her husband. The first sentence of Sonja’s memoir is, “My mother’s destiny was, undoubtedly, housework,” a fate that the young Sonja would avoid at all costs.
I Am Susan book jacket (1946).
In I Am Susann, there are harrowing accounts of parental abuse, both physical and emotional. In one case, Sonja receives a toy car as a present from a neighbor. Curious as to the mechanics of the gift, she takes it apart. Her mother calls her ungrateful for destroying a present and her father beats her mercilessly in punishment. Another time, her mother wakes up in the morning and loudly recounts a dream she had the night before in which God demands that she give up one of her daughters. Her mother is adamant in her decision to sacrifice Susann, calling her “ugly and stupid.” After describing each such incident, Susann repeats, “I don’t understand the world.”
Sonja directs rare words of praise to her father for teaching her the rules of chess at a young age. She started by playing casually with her brothers. When she began to sneak away to a chess café at twelve years old, she fell in love with the “insomnia brought on by the chaos of variations. [Chess] is happiness, deep emotion, a full and intimate vibration of all our being.”
She became a regular at the chess cafés of Munich, where her talent for the game impressed a tournament player, who arranged for her to meet Grandmaster Seigbert Tarrasch (1862-1934). He had a gang of admirers who would watch as he analyzed variations for hours.
Sonja was transfixed by Tarrasch, describing him as funny, indefatigable, and also reflective. And like Sonja he had a way with words. His ode to chess is often quoted: “Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.” He was eloquent and funny on lighter subjects, like his berating of gambiteers (players who favor gambit openings, in which players give up material, usually pawns, in the hopes of winning with a quick attack), whose ambition he said was “to acquire a reputation of being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game.”
Tarrasch’s personality and play appealed to Sonja, who admitted that ,before meeting Tarrasch, “my play was rather primitive.”
Sonja vividly recalled the day she decided that she would transfer her love for the game into a career and become a professional chessplayer. She was seventeen and had just become the female champion of Munich. Pointing out “without false modesty” that she had “strength in many areas,” she decided to dedicate her life to chess, “glimpsing through to a future interesting life: a panorama of travels, independence, magnificent liberty…and a means to know well this large, cruel, and beautiful world.”
From Sweden to Poland, Sonja traveled all over Europe with chess. Sonja’s euphoric reaction upon receiving an invitation to Ireland was typical: “…to have the joyous opportunity to visit a new country. Fantastic!” Curious and brave, Sonja records her impressions of people, parties, and drinks, always on the lookout for an amusing anecdote or character portrayal. She was wide-eyed and optimistic, even when initially disenchanted, as on her first trip to England. At first frustrated with reserved British manners, Sonja’s impression of coldness is reversed on a train trip, when she pulls out a cigarette, rummages in her bag for a light, then looks up to see that half the men in the car are offering her a match.
There was another reason Sonja traveled so much. Her hometown, Munich, had become a headquarters of the Nazis, a regime that Sonja was strongly opposed to. For a while, she relocated to the more liberal city of Hamburg, but for the most part, Sonja lived as a “gypsy fated to roam the world,” jumping on and off trains, staying until she ran out of money (which Sonja once called “a vile metal”), and pursuing one love affair after another.
Sonja enjoyed her burgeoning fame as one of the few strong females in the chess world. Of one large crowd of admirers she wrote, “Public applause infiltrated each part of my body like honey.” Giving autographs years later, “just like a movie star,” made her feel “famous and loved.” Sonja’s high opinion of herself comes up in her books again and again. She has a sixth sense, her presence is magical, and her teachers proclaim her poetry as the work of a genius. She even writes “her kisses ranked among the best possible.” Such boasting is at turns funny and unsettling. Sometimes it seems to damage the otherwise high quality of her expression and jeopardize her credibility. Was Graf not self-aware enough to realize how arrogant she would appear? Another possibility, which I began to accept as I delved more deeply into her works, is that for Sonja to live as freely as she did, s
he needed a shell of confidence harder than a woman today could imagine.
Sonja loved to shock men who underestimated her. In cafés all over Europe, Sonja would humiliate unsuspecting coffeehouse players (invariably men) by winning game after game before revealing that she was a professional player. Sonja describes her first serious game against a man memorably: “From this moment I had played only with women. How my poor heart beat remembering all the things I had heard about the stronger sex! I
began to feel a bit…overwhelmed.” But Sonja soon concluded that in chess, gender was all in the mind: “The complications of the fight dissipated all my fears. And as the game went on, I began to forget the difference between the strong and weak sex. Here I was obliged to play like a man, although, to the majority, I was only a little girl. I really felt like a man. And in this hard fight, I found strengths that were hidden inside me, and I won.”
(Photo courtesy Chess Magazine.)
Sonja sought after moments of heightened intensity in her personal life as well as her chess career. “To have experiences is to have lived,” Sonja wrote. She wanted “all life’s stimuli,” rejecting the ideal that women should abstain from sex until marriage. On special occasions, Sonja got really wild. In Barcelona, she went to a costume party as a man, wearing a suit and donning a fake goatee. Sonja danced with several of the ladies at the party and chuckled to herself about tricking them. Then, a male friend of hers recognized her face. He asked her for a dance. Sonja consented. The guests were outraged, informing her that “here, two men are not permitted to dance together.” Sonja stopped dancing with him, and, not to horrify the women she had danced with earlier, “I continued acting as a man for the rest of the night.”
Sonja portrayed in detail the alcoholic delights and nightlife at each place she visited in Europe. But she grappled with balancing fun with serious chessplay, pointing out that “alcohol is a great enemy of chess.” Post-match bar-hopping is common among even the best players in the world. The intensity of tournament play, as well as the erratic, precarious lifestyle of a professional player, has driven more than a few grandmasters to alcoholism. Perhaps another factor is that many grandmasters are of Eastern European and Russian origin, areas with high rates of alcoholism. The capacity of some grandmasters is so formidable that admiring amateurs joke that there should be a publication called Drink Like a Grandmaster. Other top players have more athletic approaches, avoiding alcohol, or at least abstaining until after a tournament. Some players can party and play well, but for most, like Sonja, there is a stark choice between bringing her A-game and enjoying herself. As my coach Victor Frias advised me, “You have a choice, Jen: either have fun at a tournament or play well.” In my experience, this advice rings true. I often extend my stays at tournaments in faraway destinations so that I can have the time to explore and enjoy the place without the demands of competition. Sonja did the same, but was still convinced that her zest for life interfered with reaching her full chess potential. Sonja used chess to set up a good life, rather than setting up her life to maximize her chess results.
Sonja had a particular passion for Spain, which she explored at the beginning of 1936, just a couple of months before the Spanish Civil War would have prevented such an adventure. Sonja was immediately infatuated with the freewheeling, nocturnal lifestyle she encountered there. Rhapsodizing about Spanish food, bullfights, and nightlife, Sonja was convinced that in Spain “the sun shines brighter and more intensely than anywhere else in the world.” The late hours suited her zest for nightlife; Sonja described giving simultaneous exhibitions (in which a strong player is invited to take on many opponents at once) that began at eleven in the evening and didn’t end until dawn.
Frequent travel left Sonja little time to style her hair, so she chopped most of it off. When walking through the streets in Burgos, a city in northern Spain, she writes that bystanders were shocked by “my hair cut very short, my sex appeal, my frankness, the vigorous line of my features, my strong profile, and my impulsive gestures. Many times I had to contain myself from making faces when listening to the absurd expressions and commentaries from people who could not be pointed out for their intellectual qualities.”
Despite her confident prose, presence, and style, Sonja was still intimidated by the top players in the world. She was invited to play in a strong round-robin tournament in Prague. She scored only 2.5 of 11, but her tournament still had some bright spots, including a draw against the great Estonian Grandmaster Paul Keres.
Sonja’s writings give the impression of a brilliant, egotistic woman who was proud of her intelligence, rather than her looks. Sonja believed that her presence transcended physical beauty. She was intolerant of women who obsessed over makeup and clothing. “I have never felt shame not to be an exceptional beauty, like so many women who live with this as their only preoccupation, because I consider physical beauty secondary.”
By all accounts Sonja was beautiful in a more conventional sense than she describes. Photographs of Sonja show a svelte woman with striking eyes and classic features. Sonja was nonchalant, even defiant, about her good looks, but fiercely proud of her mental qualities. Sixty years later, her message is still subversive.
In late July 1939, the Periapolis set sail from Antwerp, Belgium, for Buenos Aires. The World Team Championship and Women’s World Championship was set for the first time ever in the Americas. Several dozen chessplayers were among the passengers, including Vera Menchik, Paul Keres, and Mikhail Najdorf. The three-week long voyage was great fun, with constant game-playing and socialization on board along with tourist stops in Montevideo and Rio. According to British editor B.H. Wood, “The masters take their responsibility with a light heart. In fact, one might assume it is a bridge tournament they are to play!” Upon docking in Buenos Aires, B.H. Wood noted a mad practice, perhaps a sinister omen: “We were all assaulted by an official who twisted back our eyelids in search for Negro blood. The reactions of various members of our team to this ordeal are entirely unprintable.”4
Sonja set sail on the Highland Patriot a few days later, and was the sole chessplayer on her boat. Sonja was characteristically thrilled to cross the Atlantic for the first time, dismissing racist comments by Europeans who warned her of the primitive, savage customs of South Americans. Sonja, vocal against the Nazi regime, espoused the virtues of equality and liberty. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, she was promptly punished for her views. Sonja was told that Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, had removed her from the list of German participants. She played anyway, switching allegiance to the international flag of Liberty. Her new flag was not contested by the organizers or her opponents.
Germany declared war on Poland on the first of September, midway though the tournament. Play went on, despite agony and panic among the participants. The flags of all the nations except Argentina were taken down in order to ward off disputes. Some players returned immediately to Europe, including the British men’s team. Sonja described how some players from the Axis nations stopped speaking with Allied players. The top two scoring teams, Germany and Poland, refused to play their match, so they agreed to a 2-2 forfeit/draw. Politics did not interfere with the completion of the women’s games. Sonja Graf and Vera Menchik played nineteen games each, with no forfeits. They both strung together victories: Sonja won sixteen games; Vera, seventeen. But while Vera drew her two remaining games, Sonja suffered three losses. In the crucial encounter between the two women, Sonja played excellently, gaining a position she could have won in various ways. But she collapsed. She played two terrible moves in a row, first throwing away the win, and then also the chance to salvage a draw. Once again, Vera Menchik was champion of the world. Sonja Graf was second. The two women never met again. World War II interrupted the organization of Women’s World Championships for an entire decade.
Vera Menchik played in one tournament in Montevideo, Uruguay, before returning to Britain. Vera and her husband now lived in London, where they oversaw the National Chess Center. Dur
ing the war years Vera remained active in chess, though international tournaments on continental Europe were infrequent. She earned money and passed the time by playing, teaching, and writing. She won a match against Jacques Mieses—who was later awarded the grandmaster title—by a wide margin (4.5-1.5). It was a prestigious victory, though Mieses, at seventy-five, was admittedly past his prime.
The first in a series of calamities for Vera Menchik came in 1940, when the Chess Center was bombed. Luckily, the bombing took place at night, so the building was empty. A fund was set up to raise money for what was lost, but money was short and little was raised. The Menchiks survived the London Blitz (1940-1941) in the basement of their large house on Gauden Road. Menchik’s husband, Rufus, fell ill in 1940, and his health was never very good until his death in 1943. The loss almost debilitated Vera. “It was the bravest thing she could do to go on with her life,” said a friend of Vera’s.
Sonja Graf and Max Euwe.
On June 27, 1944, a crumbling Nazi regime dropped bombs over London. Vera, along with her sister and mother, was among the victims. They hid out in the bomb shelter in their basement, which was instantly demolished by the direct hit. Across their street was a subway bomb shelter, which remained intact. Their home, which contained Vera’s papers, letters, and game scores, was destroyed.
Chessplayers in Britain reacted violently to Vera’s death, calling it “an unspeakable tragedy,” and describing the event as “a robot action taken by a robot people.”5