Culture Report

Fi l m S p o r t s D a n ce Ar t Fo o d M u s i c
MTVA

34 THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017

 MTVA
The queens
of chess
The story of Hungarys
famed Polgr sisters gains
a new lease on life in an
Israeli documentary
By Tibor Krausz, Budapest

Laszl Polgr watches as his daughters Zsuzsa (left) and Zsfia

playMAY
THE JERUSALEM REPORT chess
15,at2017
the familys Budapest home in the early 1980s 35
Film

A
t the height of communism
in Hungary in the 1970s, a
cramped little apartment in a
dreary housing project in a non-
descript district of Budapest
was the site of a grand experiment.
A young Jewish-Hungarian educational
psychologist came to believe, after study-
ing the lives of famous child prodigies, that
geniuses werent born but made. If children
were immersed in one intellectual pursuit or
another from very early on, Lszl Polgr
theorized, then anything was possible.
He set out to prove it.
As his test subjects, Polgr would use his
own daughters: Zsuzsa, Zsfia and Judit. As
the focus of their instruction, the Hungarian
Jew chose chess.
Polgr was a middling player himself, but
the highly cerebral game suited his purpos-
es just fine. In chess, your progress can be
measured empirically, he tells The Jeru-
salem Report. You either win or lose, and
you can compete against players who are
ranked based on their achievements.
Chess was at the time enjoying a renaissance
across the Eastern bloc by serving as a proxy
Cold War battleground of sorts between the
United States and the Soviet Union. At an epic
showdown in 1972, the mercurial up-and-com-
ing American grandmaster Bobby Fischer de-
feated the stolid Russian world champion Bo-
ris Spassky, thereby breaking the Soviets de-
YOSSI AVIRAM
cades-long dominance of the game. By 1975,
Fischer forfeited his title to another Russian,
Anatoly Karpov.
Using Fischer, a child prodigy, as their
model, Polgr and his wife, Klra, a teach- rest of the day until bedtime at 10 pm. players to train the girls, even as the family
er, set about training a new generation of The girls, who did all their studies at lived frugally.
grandmasters right at home. In defiance home and at special classes, attended state- We were penniless, recalls Polgr,
of Hungarys communist authorities, the run schools only to take their obligatory a thoughtful, personable and avuncu-
couple would homeschool their three exams in history, literature and other com- lar 71-year-old who will expound on his
daughters, who were born a few years apart. pulsory subjects. child-rearing philosophy one minute and
Polgr, who sleeps only around four hours Polgr fashioned cardboard catalogues regale you with colorful anecdotes the next.
a night, subjected Zsuzsa, Zsfia and Judit with analyses of professional chess games In between, he may feel you out about Israe-
to a strict training regimen for years. Three 200,000 of them in all, by his own count li politics, link you up with other prominent
hours of sports in the morning table tennis, that he culled from specialist magazines Hungarian Jews, or offer to act as a match-
swimming, running, cycling were followed to create a giant handmade reference library maker for your single Jewish friends. We
by chess, more chess and yet more chess the for his daughters. He also hired expert chess breathed air but didnt eat, he elucidates.

36 THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017


We had bread and dripping for breakfast,
lunch and dinner.
At times, his daughters also had fruit and
other treats thanks to the few forints they
made by winning against grown men at a
nearby park during improvised neighbor-
hood tournaments.
By their early teens, the Polgr sisters
were each breaking old records, setting new
ones and beating grandmasters at their own
game both in Hungary and abroad. In the
process, they smashed the gender barrier in
the male-dominated world of chess, which
had and still does separate events and
rankings for men and women with the latter
hitherto dismissed as also-runs.
The Polgr familys story is well known
in Hungary and chess circles worldwide but
has now gained a new lease on life in The
Polgr Variant, an Israeli documentary that
features a series of revealing biographical
vignettes and one-on-one interviews, both
archival and newly recorded.
The documentary, which had its Budapest
THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017
STEFANO MARIGLIANI
(Left) Tel Aviv filmmaker Yossi Aviram,
who produced his documentary on a
shoestring budget, discovered the chess
trio at a tournament in Israel; (above)
the Polgr sisters today, from left: Judit,
Zsuzsa and Zsfia
premier in early May at a Jewish arts festi-
val, was a labor of love for Yossi Aviram, a
Tel Aviv-based filmmaker who produced it
on a shoestring budget. Aviram, an amateur
37
Film
chess enthusiast, first came across the Polgr
sisters story at a tournament in Israel more
than a decade ago. Id never heard of them
before, he concedes. But I began to look
into it and became fascinated by this family.
After securing some funding, Aviram set
about filming in 2007 which he would do
himself over several years. He travelled to
Budapest, where Judit still lives. He flew to
the US, where Zsuzsa now makes her home.
He befriended Zsfia in Tel Aviv, where she
has relocated after marrying Georgian-born
Israeli chess grandmaster Yona Kosash-
vili. In each location, the Israeli set up his
camera and started asking away.
But, first, he had to gain the Polgrs
trust. The family has long been guarded in
its dealings with the media, owing partly to
the frequent broadsides on its strong-willed
patriarch back in the day when Laszl faced
routine accusations in Hungary of abusing
his daughters and depriving them of a nor-
mal childhood.
They attacked him a lot, especially at
first, Zsfia, now a mother of two, tells
The Report. We girls never took those
claims seriously. We were born into [this
lifestyle] and it was natural for us.
Avirams documentary, she adds, is an
intimate portrait of our family our strug-
gles and victories. Its fantastic that Yossi
got so close to us and gained an insight into
how we were.
How they were is on full display in The
Polgr Variant.
I developed a pedagogical theory, Lasz-
l, a soft-spoken man who now divides his
time between Miami, Tel Aviv and Buda-
pest, tells Aviram, recounting the parental
philosophy that has made him almost as
famous in Hungary as a shared mastery of
chess has made his daughters worldwide.
Every healthy child is a potential genius.
By age three, Zsuzsa, his oldest child who
was born in 1969, was being taught math and
foreign languages. If she wanted to play, it
wasnt at her fathers insistence with dolls
or other toys; it would have to be with rooks,
pawns, bishops, knights, kings and queens at
38
a chessboard. She was just four when Laszl
decided to pit Zsuzsa against trained adult
players at Budapests best chess club.
My father challenged the guys to play
me a game, Zsuzsa recalls, in English, in
one of the most memorable anecdotes nar-
rated in the Israeli documentary.
They smashed the
gender barrier in the
male-dominated world
of chess, which had
and still does separate
events and rankings for
men and women
It comes early on, between bits of grainy
contemporary news footage and fading
family photographs that serve up evoca-
tive snippets of life under Hungarian-style
goulash communism circa 1973. Most
men wear shaggy bowl-cuts and suitably
subdued pastel-hued sweaters, which they
complement with solemnly furrowed brows
as they stare intensely at chessboards.
At first, they were laughing, You must
be kidding. She can hardly reach the ta-
ble, adds Zsuzsa, today a youthful-look-
ing middle-aged woman who is married to
the Vietnamese-American chess player Paul
Truong and lives in St. Louis, Missouri. The
men werent laughing for long. I won the
game [against an adult opponent]. The guy
stood up and ran away.
At age 12, in 1982, Zsuzsa won her first
international trophy, the under-16 World
Championship title for girls, in England.
Soon, she was officially recognized as a
chess master and, by age 14, as the then
best female player in the world. In a feat of
showmanship, she could play blind, without
having to see the board, and do so simul-
taneously against five different opponents.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017
My daughters could play chess while they
played ping-pong by shouting out chess
moves, Laszl recalls to The Report.
Zsfia and Judit, who were born in 1974
and 1976, respectively, received similarly in-
tensive training from age four. By age five,
Judit, the youngest of the three sisters, was
also practicing chess seven hours each day.
She would go on to develop her trademark
style of play: aggressive, creative and forever
attacking hunt for the king, as she puts it.
[I]f to play like a girl meant anything in
chess, it would mean relentless aggression,
the Jewish-Armenian grandmaster Garik
Weinstein, better known as Garry Kasparov,
has said of her style in his 2007 book How
Life Imitates Chess.
Shes sweet in life, but shes a different
person when she plays. You can see it in
her eyes, observes Aviram, who decided to
test his chess skills against Judits. When
you play against her, its like being in the
tentacles of an octopus squeezing you from
different angles, he goes on. She played
against me without her queen and still beat
me in 10 minutes. And she was speaking on
the phone with someone the whole time.
AT AGE seven, having barely turned prima-
ry-school age, Judit started playing against
scores of adult male chess enthusiasts at
high-profile simultaneous exhibitions.
Within four years, a British chess corre-
spondent proclaimed her to be the best
11-year-old [player] of either sex in the en-
tire history of chess.
By age 12, in 1988, she became the
then-youngest-ever international master.
That same year, she won an international
mixed tournament in London, besting sev-
eral male grandmasters and making history
in the process. By age 15, she was a grand-
master herself, the youngest ever, breaking
Fischers record. Henceforth, she would play
only against men and would soon become
the worlds best female chess player of all
time, snatching the honor from Zsuzsa.
The three Polgr sisters first became
national celebrities in Hungary and then
international sensations a curious trio of
child prodigies from behind the Iron Curtain.
They were the Bront sisters of chess.
One child prodigy in a family can be a
fluke. But three? Either the Polgr sisters
were all preternaturally gifted at chess or
their father was on to something.

TWO AND a half millennia ago, the Greek

philosopher Aristotle proposed that children
are born with minds that are like empty
stone tablets, or blank slates in modern
parlance, upon which training and life ex-
perience combine to inscribe knowledge
and ability. The rabbis of yore came to sim-
ilar conclusions about the plasticity of chil-
drens minds and stressed the importance of
early learning under targeted tutelage.
Laszl Polgr is no rabbi, yet he could eas-
ily pass for one with his portly frame, white
beard, thick spectacles and pensive mien.
To get results, you have to work hard, he
observes. The Talmud says the same.
The single-minded intensity of his home-
based boot camp for his daughters would
have befitted an elite yeshiva. In fact, ye-
shivot did serve as an inspiration for him.
My grandfather started studying Torah
for several hours a day when he was just

four, he tells The Report. Its always been
common practice among Jews to begin
teaching children intensively from an early
age, he adds. Weve been so successful
as a people not because were superior ge-
netically but because weve always valued
learning so highly.
But not even hard work alone will cut it
if you want to turn children into geniuses,
he believes.
In early childhood, kids need to start
specializing [in a single field of endeavor]
and not have their attention fragmented on
different subjects, he stresses. Remem-
ber how many useless things you learned
in school. Once children get hooked on a
subject be it physics, math, chess or any-
thing else they will pursue it on their own
with single-minded zeal, encouraged by
their progress and their successes, he posits.
Then all you have to do is guide them. I
set things in motion for my daughters and
they did the rest on their own, he stresses.
Even if children [who are introduced to this
method] dont become geniuses, theyll still
become very good in their chosen field.
To his critics in communist Hungary, the
Jewish pedagogue was a misguided, domi-
neering and monomaniacal drill sergeant of
a father who exploited his daughters in the
service of a psychological experiment. To
his admirers, he was a trailblazing educator
who showed that brilliance and ingenuity
could be learned traits.
My daughters are all well-adjusted,
ZSFIA POLGR
Lszl Polgr today cedes his daughters
may have had to sacrifice the carefree
joys of childhood, but counters that they
traveled the world for tournaments and all
turned out happy, smart and successful
smart, happy and successful, Laszl says.
Do they seem like people who had terrible
childhoods?
His daughters, he concedes, may have had
to sacrifice the joys of a carefree childhood
in favor of spending most of their time
indoors, hunched over chessboards, but they
also traveled the world on the international

THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017 39

Film
tournament circuit in an era when most
Hungarians were barred by their government
from setting foot anywhere outside the
Eastern bloc. The Polgr sisters played with
kangaroos in Australia; posed for photos with
Aztec pyramids in Mexico; and appeared on
television talk shows in Germany.
In my little world, the Polgrs were he-
roes, says Laszl (Eli) Berger, a Hungar-
ian-Israeli cinematographer who helped
produce The Polgr Variant. Berger, 47,
grew up at the same time as the Polgr sis-
ters in communist Hungary before making
aliya in 1991. They became globally suc-
cessful from behind the Iron Curtain all on
their own, he explains. What they did was
groundbreaking.
The documentary doesnt dwell on the
ethical implications of Laszls approach to
child-rearing, but nor does its maker side-
step them entirely.
His method does raise some moral ques-
tions, Aviram, 46, says. Im a parent
with three young children of my own. If
Id sensed that there might have been child
abuse in the Polgr family, I couldnt have
made this film. What I felt was a deep sense
of warmth and love among them.
LASZL WAS a feminist back when most
men werent certainly not in communist
Hungary. I believe a woman could win
the mens world championship title, he
explained in a TV interview in the 1980s,
apropos a game that has always been dom-
inated by men at the highest levels, if she
received the same professional, psychologi-
cal and social [support] as a man.
The trouble, as he saw it, was that peo-
ple expected less of girls so they ended up
aspiring to do less and thus achieving less.
Not his daughters. They competed as equals
against adult men, besting all of them. My
daughters beat all the 13 male world cham-
pions [of recent decades] and they won 200
games against the best male players of the
world, Laszl says.
The fathers ambitions for his daughters
became the girls own ambitions. Officials at
40
the Hungarian Chess Federation wanted the
Polgr sisters to dominate the international
womens competitions, scoring propaganda
points for the communist regime. But the
Polgr family, spearheaded by their stiff-
necked patriarch, openly defied the wishes
of Communist Party leader Jnos Kdr, an
amateur chess buff. My father and I, we had
the vision that I would become a grandmas-
ter among men, Zsuzsa recalls.
My daughters could
play chess while they
played ping-pong by
shouting out chess
moves
In communist Hungary, where childrens
education had to be in line with state-sanc-
tioned Marxist principles of obedient uni-
formity, Laszls independent-minded ap-
proach drew the ire of apparatchiks. They
threatened to jail him or confine him to a
psychiatric hospital and take his daughters
away to a state-run institution.
Yet, Laszl was simply following in the
footsteps of like-minded fathers who, for
centuries, have sought to excel vicariously
through their progeny. The 18th-century
German musician Leopold Mozart began
teaching music intensively to his son Wolf-
gang Amadeus when the boy was still a tod-
dler. By age five, little Amadeus was com-
posing music.
Through similarly rigorous training, the
19th-century Hungarian mathematician Far-
kas Bolyai turned his famous son, Jnos,
into a wunderkind who had, by age 13, mas-
tered calculus. In the 20th century, Moshe
Menuhin, a Jewish immigrant from Belarus
who was a descendant of Chabad Hassi-
disms founder Rabbi Schneur Zalman of
Liadi (himself a child prodigy), set his Amer-
ican-born son Yehudi on course to becoming
one of the worlds greatest violinists.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017
What was new was that dad did it in such
a closed society and that we were girls in
a mens world, Zsfia, who speaks fluent
Hebrew, tells The Report.
THE POLGRS were also proudly Jewish
in a country where anti-Jewish sentiments
have long lurked under the surface, ready
to burst forth any minute in a smirk, scowl
or insult. I find it hard to tolerate antisem-
itism, Laszl observes. As a child, he says
he was tormented and humiliated by neigh-
borhood bullies for being Jewish. Being a
Jew gave me extra motivation to succeed,
he explains.
His daughters increasing success in chess
on the international stage became a form of
security for the family against threats and
intimidation at home from Hungarys com-
munist regime. It didnt save them, howev-
er, from being barred by the government
from competing at international tourna-
ments for three years after 1984.
When the three sisters were at last al-
lowed to compete internationally, they did
so spectacularly. In 1988, they won gold for
Hungarys team at the 28th Womens Chess
Olympiad in Thessaloniki, Greece, breaking
the Soviet Unions decades-long dominance
of competitive chess. All of a sudden, we
became national treasures, Zsuzsa recalls.
Laszl, their doting father, finally felt
validated.
The following year, the Berlin Wall fell and
his daughters were free to compete against
men abroad without any political interfer-
ence. That same year, in a pair of seminal
achievements for female players, 12-year-
old Judit won eight competitive tournaments
in a row, while Zsfia won her first eight
games straight against as many expert male
opponents at a tournament in Rome.
The Polgr Variant, which runs a little
more than an hour, largely eschews Lasz-
ls views on child-rearing and opts instead
for a straightforward retelling of the Polgr
familys story through the eyes of the three
sisters. Much of it makes for compulsive
viewing.
 In one touching segment, Aviram escorts
Zsfia back to the small unit in a Sovi-
et-style apartment building in Budapest
where her family of five once lived. The
flat is now occupied by an elderly man,
who doesnt seem to recognize her. Zs-
fia surveys the walk-in closet-size kitch-
en and cramped little rooms nostalgically.
Once this setting was the center stage of her
familys life and seemed spacious enough;
today, it looks like an odd relic from a by-
gone historical era, where peoples mental
and physical horizons were confined by a
repressive political system. It looked so
small to me as an adult, she tells The Re-
port, laughing. But back then it seemed
like a nice apartment.
IN ANOTHER vignette, Zsfia, a cheerful,
amiable woman who was the first among
the sisters to turn her back on professional
competitions in 2003 to start a family, plays
a game of speed chess with her husband at
their home in Tel Aviv. Kosashvili, an or-
thopedic surgeon, provides some lightheart-
ed rapid-fire commentary. This is a variant
of the Spanish opening. Its a very closed concedes, may have
position, he explains, while pushing his
king into a position before hurriedly repo-
sitioning it. Sofi, with a big smile on her
face, is going to checkmate me.
In yet another segment, Aviram shows old
family footage, recorded by Laszl with a
camcorder in 1986, of his elderly father,
Armin, who had survived Auschwitz, where
he lost his parents, first wife and six chil-
dren. After the war, Armin remarried, to a
fellow survivor of Auschwitz, and Laszl
was born of this second union in 1946. The
elderly man is shown holding a memorial
service to the Hungarian victims of the Ho-
locaust at the local Jewish cemetery in his
hometown of Gyngys, east of Budapest.
In death camps, on snowfields, on roads
and on riverbanks, the elderly man, who in
the grainy home-video footage resembles
a Hasid in his immaculate black suit and
matching black fedora, intones indignantly
from a prepared note, We were tortured,
annihilated, strangled, killed and murdered
in the service of pitiless hatred and bloodlust,
alongside our 600,000 [Hungarian] coreli-
gionists. Their memory will live on forever.
His young granddaughters stand around
in their crisp white shirts as birds chirp in
the trees.
Aviram discovered the footage on one of
the old VHS cassettes that Laszl lent him.
When I came across this recording, I knew
I had a film, the Israeli filmmaker recalls.
It gave new meaning to their story.
So does another small but telling detail:
Laszl, who spent two years in a Jewish
orphanage in his early teens because of
the breakup of his parents marriage, gets
misty-eyed over the classic vaudeville song
My Yiddishe Mama. Hes collected some
70 different versions of the song on care-
fully stored CDs. Laszl is a very likeable
guy, Berger observes, but hes quite driv-
en and obsessive.
Hes also relentless.
His daughters, he
had to sacrifice the
joys of a carefree
childhood in favor of
spending most of their
time indoors, hunched
over chessboards
He has, to date, published 123 books,
several of them bestsellers, on his enduring
twin interests: chess and child psycholo-
gy. Hes also invented two new variants
of chess, including one called star chess in
which the game is played on a star-shaped
board with slightly different rules to allow
for different creative strategies. There are
now international championships held in it.
But his greatest success has been the
THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAY 15, 2017
successes of his three daughters. Although
the three Polgr sisters have all retired from
professional competitions, they remain ac-
tive in promotional and educational projects
involving chess.
Theyve also remained in the limelight.
Zsuzsa has starred in a National Geographic
documentary about the wonders of the hu-
man brain; Judit has given a TED talk on
how to become a genius; and Zsfia has
written and illustrated award-winning chess
manuals for children to help them think
creatively.
What I regret is that none of them have
followed my example in raising their own
children, their father laments.
Theyve also left another one of his en-
during hopes for them unfulfilled none of
them has won the mens world champion-
ship title.
Only Judit ever really stood that chance.
In her career, she claimed the scalps of
numerous male grandmasters and world
champions, leaving most of them in com-
plete disbelief.
In 1992, when she was still just 17, she
defeated Spassky, the former world cham-
pion, at an exhibition match in Budapest.
A decade later, at a competitive event in
Moscow, she beat Kasparov, an expert strat-
egist and arguably the best chess player of
all time, who dominated the sport for two
decades. Kasparov, who had once dismissed
her as a circus puppet, left the table in a
huff, refusing to shake her hand.
Today, shes married in Budapest with
two children and competitive chess is no
longer her first priority. The only thing she
has not achieved she probably never will,
Aviram observes laconically.
Then again, what matters in the end is
that the Polgrs took on the world and won.
They did it in style and they did it together.
As children, we were so close together,
this small team of us, for 24 hours a day,
Zsfia says, a hint of bittersweet nostalgia
creeping into her voice. Now, weve been
flung around the world. But chess will al-
ways remain a large part of our lives. 
41