World Chess Champion Bobby Fisher died at age 64. He was crazy like a goat, a clinical paranoid, querulous and unfit. Reading about his behaviour, I recognized and understood him, because I live among people like him. From his behaviour I always, instinctively, felt he was a Hungarian Jew, but his ethnic identity was always somewhat of a mistery, so I doubted. After his death, the details are coming to light. Of course he was a Hungarian Jew, like all of us are.
Paul F. Nemenyi - Fischer's father, though not listed on the birth certificate - was a Hungarian Jewish physicist. He was admitted to the US with the refugee scholar program, and worked for the Manhattan Project. The original family name was Neumann. Bobby´s mother, Regina, spoke six languages and had studied medicine in Moscow during the Stalin era. A psychiatrist once diagnosed her as paranoid.
In 1942, Regina Fischer was in Denver. She was taking classes at the University of Denver. At 29, Regina had already lived in eight other cities, four other countries. This was her ninth job and her sixth university. She was the mother of a 5-year-old girl, and she was alone. Her husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, was thousands of miles away in Santiago, Chile, barred by immigration authorities from entering the United States, probably because he was a Communist. Into the void stepped Paul Nemenyi.
Nemenyi himself was no heartthrob (pic above: Left: Bobby Fischer, Right: Paul Nemenyi). He was 47, a Hungarian refugee and a theoretical engineer teaching at a nearby college. He made $165 a month and shuffled when he walked. An animal-rights supporter, he refused to wear wool to keep warm. Instead, he walked around in winter with his pajamas poking out from beneath his clothes.
Still, he had a compelling mind. "He was smart, very, very smart," recalls Charlotte Truesdell, who worked at a research laboratory with Nemenyi in the '40s. "He had a strange kind of memory. He remembered things by their shapes."
Regina, daughter of a Polish Jew, had moved to the United States with her family as a baby, but returned to Europe as a young adult and studied medicine. Like Nemenyi, she lived in Berlin in the early '30s, when Hitler was coming to power. It was there that she met Fischer, with whom she moved to Moscow, where they lived for several years under Stalin.
There is a terse account of the liaison in the 900-page file that the FBI eventually compiled on Regina. The investigation began in 1942, when a baby-sitter found what she believed to be pro-communist letters belonging to Regina and turned them over to the FBI. Nemenyi told one FBI informant, a social worker, that he met Regina at the University of Denver. But whatever follows in the file, as released under the Freedom of Information Act, is censored by the FBI. When the narrative again picks up, suddenly Bobby is in the picture. The file says, "He [NEMENYI] advised he helped support the boy."
But by the time of Bobby's birth, Regina had moved to Chicago, while Nemenyi was teaching in Rhode Island. She gave birth to her son alone, in a clinic for poor single mothers. And on the birth certificate, she listed Fischer as the father. She briefly considered putting her newborn son up for adoption. But in talking to a social worker - who would later share the story with the FBI - she broke down and cried, unable to go through with it.
Regina then moved into a Chicago home for fatherless families. Ever the nonconformist, she led a rebellion among the other mothers, encouraging them to question the institution's rules. The home called the police, and Regina was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. She was acquitted. A court-ordered psychological exam found her to be "paranoid" and "querulous." That description might also fit her son.
At the Marshall Chess Club in New York, members sit over inlaid chess tables, kibitz and analyze games. In the late '50s, the club's board of governors held an unusual meeting. The subject was Bobby Fischer. He had moved to Brooklyn with his family in 1949, at the age of 6. At 11, by his own reckoning, he "just got good." His mother was often working double shifts as a private-duty nurse. "Some of what he did was so outrageous it was decided maybe he had emotional problems," says Kaufman, who attended the meeting. What to do? Board members talked about finding a psychiatrist. They considered Reuben Fine, himself one of the giants of the game. Then someone raised a question: What if therapy worked? What if treatment sapped Fischer's drive to win, depriving the United States of its first homegrown world champ? Meeting adjourned. No one, Kaufman recalls, wanted to tamper with that finely tuned brain.
Bobby's family worried about him even earlier than that. When Bobby was 3, Nemenyi visited a social worker to complain about the way Regina was raising him. By then, he and Regina had split, and he was living in Washington. Regina was "mentally upset," and Bobby was an "upset child," he told the caseworker, apparently without results. Two years later, Nemenyi sought help again, telling a social worker that his son was "not being brought up in desirable circumstances, due to the instability of the mother." Regina herself sought the help of social workers when Bobby was 14. She described him as "temperamental, unable to get along with others, without friends his age, and without any interests other than chess." But this was not just another kid absorbed in a hobby. This was the best chess player in the country. Bobby won the U.S. chess championship in 1957 - the same year Regina complained of his obsession - edging out 46-year-old Samuel Reshevsky, one of the greatest players the game has seen.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis came for Paul Nemenyi; it was also the day of a general boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in Berlin. The charges, when SS troops arrested him, were that Nemenyi had made "calumnious statements" against Hitler's government. He was jailed for a day, then released. Not enough evidence. Still, Nemenyi would lose his university teaching job the following week, when Hitler purged the civil service of Jews. Nemenyi, then 37, had already fled fascism in his homeland, Hungary, where anti-Semitic laws had been enacted. Now he would have to run again. He was being uprooted at a promising point in his career, having just published a groundbreaking textbook on fluid mechanics that would be required reading in German universities. Some of the other Hungarian refugees living in Berlin at the time would flee to America and become some of the most prominent scientists of the 20th century. Nemenyi knew the giants, and they knew him, though he would never be as accomplished. They were all part of an elite intellectual circle being hounded out of Europe. Nemenyi fled first to Denmark, then to Britain. In the fall of 1938, he sailed to the United States to find a job. He headed to Princeton to consult with Albert Einstein. Nemenyi also gave his resume to the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, a New York organization that tried to find work for the hundreds of academics fleeing Europe. But his personality got in the way. "
He is an unstable and undesirable person," one note in the committee's files reads. Nemenyi finally found a job working for Einstein's son, Hans-Albert, at the University of Iowa's hydrology lab. It was the first in a string of short-term teaching jobs around the country. Nemenyi's fellow Hungarian, the great aeronautical scientist Theodore von Karman, proclaimed him a misfit. "When he came to this country, he went to scientific meetings in an open shirt without a tie and was very much disappointed as I advised him to dress as anyone else," von Karman wrote of Nemenyi in one letter. "He told me that he thought this is a country of freedom, and the man is only judged according to his internal values and not his external appearance."
Life in America remained something of a disappointment. Nemenyi never landed a job at the most prestigious schools, never wrote the book he had planned on fluid mechanics. He was a physicist and a theoretician. But when he met Regina in 1942, he had a temporary job teaching freshman math at the University of Colorado.
After Paul's death in 1961 Regina Fischer's life was desperate. He had been paying for 8-year-old Bobby's education and sending $20 a week. She had long since divorced Gerhardt Fischer, who had never lived with her in the United States. She was in nursing school in Brooklyn, broke and facing eviction. Regina wrote to Peter Nemenyi, Paul's son, who was then getting his doctorate in math at Princeton. She asked if any money had been set aside for Bobby. "Bobby has not had a decent meal at home this past month and was sick two days with fever and sore throat, and of course a doctor or medicine was out of the question," she wrote. "I don't think Paul would have wanted to leave Bobby this way and would ask you most urgently to let me know if Paul left anything for Bobby."
It is unclear what Bobby knew at that point about his relationship to Paul Nemenyi. It is clear that they knew each other. Regina told Peter in her letter, "Bobby is still expecting Paul." Regina didn't want to be the one to tell Bobby of Nemenyi's death. She hoped Peter would do it. But Peter was uncomfortable with that, so he wrote to a family doctor for advice. "I take it you know that Paul was Bobby Fischer's father," he wrote, saying that he didn't feel "qualified" to break the news, having met the boy only a couple of times. "The matter is further complicated by
the false pretenses about Bobby's identity and the parents' differences of opinion over this question," Peter wrote.
Not a happy, likeable people. My people.
