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Remembering Bobby
March 11, 2016
ChessBase is doing a series of articles entitled Remembering Bobby on the occasion of his 73rd birthday.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/remembering-bobby-part-1
The first part by Prof. Nagesh Havanur has a photo of Bobby Fischer’s parents – Regina Wender and Hans Gerhardt Fischer.
Doubt has been cast on Hans as being the father.
Part I concludes with these paragraphs:
Way back in 2002 two enterprising reporters, Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson from the Phildelphia Inquirer had stumbled on some startling facts while researching material on Bobby’s background. Years later Peter Nicholas wrote how it all happened:
“Bobby was born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn by a single mother, Regina Fischer. She told people his father was a German biophysicist named Gerhardt Fischer. The couple divorced when Bobby was a toddler. That's about all that was known.
The dearth of details about Gerhardt and his role in Bobby's life whetted my curiosity. What was he like? Did he share his son's intellectual gifts? What kind of relationship did they have?
FBI dossiers are often a rich source of information. I thought it unlikely the bureau had a file on Gerhardt, but Regina was well-known in her day. Whatever information the FBI had collected about her might shed light on him. I requested the file under the Freedom of Information Act. A few months later, it arrived in the mail -- 900 heavily edited pages reflecting the ideological phobias of a bygone era.
Regina married Gerhardt in Moscow in 1933, and the couple lived there for several years. She returned to the U. S. at the outset of World War II. The FBI, suspecting she was a Soviet agent, read her mail and tracked her movements for years. (In the end, agents concluded she was not a spy.)
The file has little to say about Gerhardt. But its pages are crammed with details about a man Clea and I had never heard of: Paul Felix Nemenyi.”
______
Presumably, there will be a lot more about Nemenyi in Part II.
ChessBase says this about the author: Nagesh Havanur (otherwise known as chessbibliophile) is a senior academic and research scholar. He taught English in Mumbai for three decades and has now settled in Bangalore, India. His interests include chess history, biography and opening theory. He has been writing on the Royal Game for more than a decade. His articles and reviews have appeared on several web sites and magazines. He often writes at thechessworld.com
March 11, 2016
ChessBase is doing a series of articles entitled Remembering Bobby on the occasion of his 73rd birthday.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/remembering-bobby-part-1
The first part by Prof. Nagesh Havanur has a photo of Bobby Fischer’s parents – Regina Wender and Hans Gerhardt Fischer.
Doubt has been cast on Hans as being the father.
Part I concludes with these paragraphs:
Way back in 2002 two enterprising reporters, Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson from the Phildelphia Inquirer had stumbled on some startling facts while researching material on Bobby’s background. Years later Peter Nicholas wrote how it all happened:
“Bobby was born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn by a single mother, Regina Fischer. She told people his father was a German biophysicist named Gerhardt Fischer. The couple divorced when Bobby was a toddler. That's about all that was known.
The dearth of details about Gerhardt and his role in Bobby's life whetted my curiosity. What was he like? Did he share his son's intellectual gifts? What kind of relationship did they have?
FBI dossiers are often a rich source of information. I thought it unlikely the bureau had a file on Gerhardt, but Regina was well-known in her day. Whatever information the FBI had collected about her might shed light on him. I requested the file under the Freedom of Information Act. A few months later, it arrived in the mail -- 900 heavily edited pages reflecting the ideological phobias of a bygone era.
Regina married Gerhardt in Moscow in 1933, and the couple lived there for several years. She returned to the U. S. at the outset of World War II. The FBI, suspecting she was a Soviet agent, read her mail and tracked her movements for years. (In the end, agents concluded she was not a spy.)
The file has little to say about Gerhardt. But its pages are crammed with details about a man Clea and I had never heard of: Paul Felix Nemenyi.”
______
Presumably, there will be a lot more about Nemenyi in Part II.
ChessBase says this about the author: Nagesh Havanur (otherwise known as chessbibliophile) is a senior academic and research scholar. He taught English in Mumbai for three decades and has now settled in Bangalore, India. His interests include chess history, biography and opening theory. He has been writing on the Royal Game for more than a decade. His articles and reviews have appeared on several web sites and magazines. He often writes at thechessworld.com