Chess Goddesses

Mona May Karff

Mona May Karff (1914-1998), was born in Besssarabia and moved to the United States in the 1930's. She was the U.S. Women's Chess Champion seven times: 1938, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1948 (with Gisela Gresser), 1953, and 1974!

She was a true woman of mystery. An obituary article from the New York Times in 1998 indicates that Ms. Karff (nee Ratner), was a millionaire (stock market), a world traveller who spoke eight languages fluently. By her own account, she learned chess from her father at the age of nine, and was soon outstripping him and others. Reluctant at first to enter into tournament competition, after she won her first, she never looked back, becoming obsessed with The Game. She was apparently married for a brief time to a cousin after she arrived in the United States; but she told no one, not even her best friend, who found out about the one-time marriage by accident!

A long-time resident of New York, Ms. Karff became a regular at the Marshall Chess Club, founded by Frank J. Marshall, a long-time U.S. chess champion (it was Caroline Marshall, his wife, who organized the 1938 U.S. Women's Championship at the Rockefeller Center in New York). There, she found romance in the person of Dr. Edward Lasker (not to be confused with Emanuel Lasker, World Chess Champion who died in 1941), a five-time winner of the U.S. Chess Open, a man 25 years her senior. Dr. Lasker died in 1981, at the age of 95.

Ms. Karff was named an International Woman Master in 1950, along with Gisela Gresser. While her record as a U.S. Champion speaks for itself, Ms. Karff did not fare as well in international competitions. However, she made a significant and lasting contribution to women's chess in the United States: From the time she won her first national title at the second women's championship in 1938 until she clinched her seventh national championship in 1974, Miss Karff was in the forefront of women's chess in the United States. She and a handful of other players, among them the late Sonja Graf Stevenson, the late Mary Bain, and 92-year old Gisela Kahn Gresser, a nine-time titleholder, dominated tournament competition.

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