Miguel Najdorf with his first wife Genia, a talented pianist, who would be killed in
M i g u e L n a j D o r f A49
for their game in the company of two women and, after playing each move, would casually retire to enjoy their adulation. But after Najdorf produced a double-edged continuation, Capa, apparently caught by surprise, offered a draw. Najdorf shocked the onlook- ers by declining, despite the fact that he had just a minute left on the clock to play 18 moves.
In August 1939, Najdorf set sail for the Buenos Aires Olympiad, the first ever Olympiad on Latin American soil. It was just a month before the Nazis invaded Poland. In a fateful decision, Genia, who was suffering from the flu, decided to remain behind in Warsaw with their young daughter, Lusha.
Najdorf, although the captain of the Polish team in Buenos Aires, ceded top board to Tartakower. Poland took the silver medal, just half a point behind the victors, Germany. Najdorf once again won the gold medal. But he could not celebrate. On September 1, the Polish Ambassador in Buenos Aires, Zdzislaw Kurnikowski, announced the Nazi invasion of Poland during Naj- dorf’s game with the Dutchman, Nico Cortlever. Although Najdorf held the advantage in this game, the news from Poland was so distressing that he went on to lose it.
In desperation, he tried to bring his family out of Poland, appealing to Argentina’s President Roberto María Ortiz and to Kurnikowski. Neither could help. Najdorf’s father, Gdalik, died in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and the remaining members of the family were sent either to Auschwitz or Tre- blinka death camps. They included his wife, Genia, and their daughter Lusha.
It is difficult to imagine the emotional toll such a tragedy took on Najdorf. He recalled later: ‘There were 300 people in my family and not one of them sur- vived.’ Perhaps this was not quite true. He was once travelling in the New York subway when he noticed a man read- ing a Polish newspaper. They started talking and the man revealed himself to be a cousin of Najdorf’s. Intriguingly,
during a visit Najdorf made to Israel in 1996 – just a year before his death – the Israeli chess magazine Shahmat pub-
lished an interview with him together with Esther Salzman, whom the mag- azine described as ‘his cousin, the last scion of his Polish family.’
‘I remained in Buenos Aires with- out speaking the language,’ Najdorf said, ‘all alone and with two hun- dred dollars in my pocket. I thought I was going crazy, but chess helped me. Chess teaches you to lose.’ According to Liliana, Najdorf was faced with the decision of whether to stay on in Bue- nos Aires or leave for Cuba, where an uncle was living (after fleeing Poland for refusing to serve in the Army). Capablanca, it seems, attempted to lure Najdorf to Havana, but he was starting to enjoy life in the Buenos Aires board- ing house he shared with Paul Keres in the Calle Lavalle.
Having decided to remain in Argen- tina, Najdorf changed his name in mid- 1940 from Mendel (or Mieczyslaw) to Miguel Najdorf and began earning a living by selling ties and perfume in the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, the Once. For a while, he also taught chess in the Newell’s Old Boys Club in the city of Rosario, about 170 miles north- west of Buenos Aires.
Another way he began to make money was to take advantage of his prodigious memory. First, he was a ‘mnemotechnician’ – he appeared in shows where he memorized numbers on a piece of paper. He said these shows proved very lucrative but were ‘crip- pling’. Then he began giving simulta- neous chess displays around Argentina. Here, his chief motive seems to have been a desire to alert any possible sur- viving relatives back home in Poland as to his whereabouts. His chess-playing exploits did indeed reach his homeland – but no family members were alive to receive the news.
His feats were certainly notewor- thy. In 1940, just a year after settling in Buenos Aires, he set the world record for a blindfold simultaneous display in Rosario. Of the 40 games, he won
36, drew three and lost just one. This record could not be ratified, however, because it was not witnessed by inter- national observers. No matter. In Octo- ber 1943, he became ‘World Blindfold Champion’, again in Rosario, and then went on to beat his own record in a rainstorm in Sao Paulo on January 25, 1947. In fact, on this occasion in Bra- zil, although there were 45 boards, the games took so long that he graciously allowed his exhausted opponents to be substituted, so he actually played against a total of 83 opponents. He himself changed his suit once because of the storm. Asked later whether it was true that he could not sleep for days afterwards and that he had finally dozed off in a cinema, Najdorf replied: ‘Yes, it is. Can you imagine how bad that movie must have been?’ His Sao Paolo blindfold record was finally superseded by George Koltanowski in San Francisco in 1961.
‘On a plane or a train, I read chess books as if they were detective novels.’
50A M i g u e L n a j D o r f
Miguel najdorf
six articles for the Argentinian pub- lication, Mundo Argentino, entitled
‘I will be World Champion.’ Here, he declared: ‘I have come to the conclu- sion that, if they invite me to the next tournament for the World Champi- onships, I will definitely win. I con- cede that my future opponents have the upper hand in the openings. But I play my own lines and have my very own openings. I’m studying and there will be some surprises in store. I have novelties which I am keeping for the right moment. As for the middle game, I don’t think anyone is better than me. My play has undergone a natural and beneficial evolution. In my youth, I loved wonderful, brilliant combina- tions. But later on, I came to under- stand the beauty of Capablanca’s play: it was simple yet more difficult and beautiful than the spectacular sacri- fice. As for the endgame, that’s one of my strong points. But my real strength lies in gaining the initiative. I believe the hardest thing in chess is to win a won game. My strength is in being able to finish off a game accurately and at times I have achieved Capablanca’s machine-like precision.’
He added: ‘If the World Champion has to be a complete man, capable of dominating all styles of play, then I can become World Champion. Maybe I’m being a little excessive, but I don’t find too many difficulties playing chess. It does not wear me out, because my strength does not always lie in calcula- tion but in intuition. On a plane or a train, I read chess books as if they were detective novels.’
In around 1941, a friend – some sources claim that it was the Argentin- ian chess player Carlos Guimard – sug- gested that Najdorf take up work as an insurance salesman. According to his future son-in-law, Víctor Solnicki, Naj- dorf first worked for Sun Life of Can- ada and National Western Life, before later joining Jackson National Life, for whom he acted as their general agent outside the United States. ‘Miguel was a very talented person and he made a lot of money selling insurance policies to very rich people in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Vene- zuela.’ Solnicki told Tomasz Lissowski. The Argentinian chess writer and cor- respondence chess grandmaster, Juan Sebastián Morgado, told me in Buenos Aires that Najdorf had even travelled to Paraguay to draw up a highly lucra- tive insurance policy for the dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner. This was confirmed to Morgado by the Chilean International Master, René Letelier.
In 1944, Najdorf officially became an Argentinian citizen. He would often say that the finest move he ever played was deciding to stay on and live in Bue- nos Aires.
Between 1939 and 1946, Najdorf won – or was placed equal first in – fifteen tournaments. In August and September 1946, Groningen in the Netherlands staged the first major international tournament after the end of the Second World War. The event also marked the first time that the Soviet Union ever sent a team to an event outside the USSR. His old friend and men- tor, Tartakower, was now represent- ing France and the US participants included Samuel Reshevsky and Reu- ben Fine. The Soviet contingent was led by Mikhail Botvinnik, who was leading the tournament with one round to go. In that final round, Najdorf defeated Botvinnik and won 500 Dutch guilders through a bet with another, unknown player or journalist – Najdorf would prove to be a life-long gambler, like his own father.
The 37-year-old Najdorf was not short on confidence. In 1947, he wrote
As it turned out, Najdorf never did get a chance to play a match for the world title. According to some sources, Mikhail Botvinnik did not like Najdorf’s fun-loving nature – in particular the open joy he had demonstrated after defeating him at Groningen – and played a leading role in blocking Najdorf’s access to the world title cycle. Héctor Rossetto – the Argentinian grandmaster and director of the 1978 Buenos Aires Olympiad – told Juan Sebastián Morgado that, when Botvin- nik heard how Najdorf had made a bet that he would beat him in Groningen, Botvinnik began cursing the man he called ‘the capitalist pig’ and instructed the Soviet delegation that they must do all in their power to prevent Najdorf playing for the world title. According to Morgado, Botvinnik managed to have the list of Candidates for the 1948 World Championship eliminator tour- nament (divided between The Hague and Moscow) reduced from eight to just six, and even when Reuben Fine dropped out, Najdorf was not allowed to take his place. Botvinnik himself won the tournament convincingly.
Morgado is convinced that Botvinnik wielded sufficient power at this point to ensure that Najdorf was not invited to compete for the world title. ‘The Soviet political system allowed Botvinnik enormous advantages. And FIDE itself was controlled by the USSR Chess Fed- eration. The Botvinnik-Keres match in the same tournament, in which Botvin- nik won the first four games, was com- pletely anomalous.’
However, Tomasz Lissowski disa- grees. He told me: ‘In 1948, Botvinnik was – in my opinion – not in a position to dictate his wishes to the whole chess world. That would be a major exag- geration. The six players – Euwe, Fine, Reshevsky, Smyslov, Keres and Botvin- nik – apparently did not want to share the honours with anyone else. None of those six voted for Najdorf, who, as the winner of the tournament in Prague, did have some right to be there. But in any case, they were stronger than Najdorf in 1948.’