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| Bobby Fischer
et Zita Raiczanyi Fragment from the article by By Andrew Anthony, Guardian Unlimited Sunday May 9, 1999 "That evening, I have dinner with a woman whom Fischer once asked to marry. Zita Raiczanyi was a 17-year-old fan and Hungarian junior chess champion when she sent a letter to Fischer, care of the American Chess Federation. A year later, he wrote back. They entered into a correspondence that quickly led to Fischer's inviting the young girl to stay with him in LA. Comfortably plump and homely in dress, Raiczanyi, now a 26-year-old mother of two who married a Hungarian chess player, has a teasingly sharp sense of humour and a keen mind. She also speaks near-perfect English. It's not hard to see why Fischer found her attractive. In Hungary, it is assumed that she and Fischer were lovers. During their relationship, Fischer called her his fiance. She denies that her friendship with Fischer was sexual. 'He was very kind,' she recalls of their first meeting at LAX airport. 'He was friendly to strangers, getting into conversations on the street. Maybe the point was, these people didn't know him.' She says she stayed with Fischer's friend in LA, a man who shared his beliefs about Jews, and the one who recently forgot to pay the rent on the storage space. 'Of course,' says Raiczanyi, raising her eyes in mock despair, 'he now realises the guy was a Jew.' I ask her if Fischer ever explained his hatred of Jews. 'He told me that, in his childhood, his mother had lots of Jewish friends who spent lots of time at the apartment, in endless conversation. At about 12 years old, he decided this wasn't normal.' Yet that decision does not appear to have prevented Fischer from relying on friends. For years, they would put him up for weeks or months at a time. Even in Hungary, he would visit chess player Lazlo Polgar, and moan for hours about Jews. Polgar is Jewish. Raiczanyi says that Polgar, whose daughter Judit is one of the world's leading players, tolerated Fischer because of the standing his company conferred in the Budapest chess community. She also claims that Polgar sold Fischer's autographs. (Polgar refused to speak to me when I called, and stated that he didn't know Fischer.) In California, Raiczanyi met Regina Fischer. 'She was very nice, a strong lady. Bobby started talking about Jews, and she said: Why do you think you're so pure?' Fischer had a one-room flat in downtown LA, where he lived using the pseudonym of Robert James (James is his middle name). 'He was very poor. I was lending him money sometimes,' says Raiczanyi. It was she who persuaded Fischer to play again by suggesting that she would find a sponsor. Back in Hungary, she met Janos Kabut, a newspaper publisher, who put her in touch with Serbian millionaire Jezdimir Vasiljevic. Between them, they brokered a deal with Fischer. The American's demands were, as ever, exacting. He wanted 15 bodyguards and insisted that the nose of the knight piece should be a certain length. Kubat once said that dealing with Fischer was simple: you just give him everything he asks for. Raiczanyi attended the Fischer/Spassky rematch, which took place in 1992 in Belgrade and Montenegro. She says that she barely saw Fischer, as he was preoccupied with the game. Afterwards, he began calling her in Budapest, telling her that they should get married and have children. She says she was shocked, not least because she was going out with the man to whom she is now married. 'Bobby said, Leave him. I've won from worse positions than this.' She refused, and eventually - after Fischer continued to repeat his appeal - broke off contact in 1993. It wasn't until his birthday in March this year that she called him again. They met up and, maniacally upset, he told her about the sale of his goods in Pasadena. Fischer is under threat of a jail sentence and a $200,000 fine if he returns to America, as a result of an indictment for breaking the US embargo on Yugoslavia. Naturally, Fischer sees the hand of Jewish conspiracy, but his revulsion encompasses all representatives of the US states He told Raiczanyi that the American soldiers held captive in Yugoslavia should be executed. He also complained that a new edition of his book, My 60 Memorable Games, published by the British company Batsford, had deliberately rendered his moves incorrectly. Again, he saw further evidence of a Jewish plot. I called Graham Burgess, who was responsible for the new edition, and asked him if there were mistakes. He conceded that there had been one particular error, but that he had corrected many others from the first edition. He was very sympathetic to Fischer and did not want to be seen in opposition to him. 'Chess books are very complicated, and I used a new notation system,' he explained, then added, as an afterthought: 'I'm not Jewish, by the way.' Raiczanyi is studying to be a psychologist. I ask her why she thinks Fischer, a man with an IQ of more than 180, had developed such a debilitating persecution complex. 'If a person is not able to confess his own mistakes,' she replies, 'he tries to project them on other people.' James Kubat, press director of the match, speaks of "a fairy-tale motive": a series of "it's never too late" letters sent to Fischer, who's about to turn fifty, by a Hungarian chess master, Zita Rajcsanyi, his girlfriend, occasionally referred to as his fiancee. I spent an afternoon playing chess with Zita -- an incredibly patient, mothering nineteen-year-old who wears thick glasses, a ponytail, long, wrinkled skirts, T-shirts, and Converse high-tops she laces all the way up her calf-and find it easy to believe Kubat's fairy tale. Not only does she let me win every game, she makes Fischer seem like an open book. "He's completely natural. He plays no roles," she says. "He's like a child. Very, very simple." Bobby Fischer’s Endgame, Ivan Solotaroff Esquire - December 1992 |
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