ALPHETA'S LITERARY AGORA
BOOK REVIEWS

Reviews of newly published forays into the culture of chess
Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom
Silver Queen - The Glamour and Shadow of Success by Maria Ivanka

We present an ever-expanding overview of women's achievements in chess. Additional contents appear under the following sub-headings:

 

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Silver Queen - The Glamour and Shadow of Success
by Maria Ivanka
Kinizsi Press
Hungary, 2002
277 pages (additional 32 pages of black and white and colored photographs)
$21.95

Review for Chess Cafe
by Janet Newton
March 1, 2004
Buy this book at Amazon.com 

When I was asked to review Silver Queen, I said yes without thinking about it, even though I hadn't done anything of the sort before. It was only after I started reading the book that the qualms began to surface!

Don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of chess in general and women's chess in particular. I regularly read the latest tournament news (even the insidiously boring Chess Life), keep up with events via the most popular internet websites and cheer on my favorite players with indiscriminate fervor, and am actively involved in the Goddesschess website devoted to the Royal Game. One thing I haven't done, though, is read a lot of books about chess or chessplayers. I have to confess I haven't even read Susan Polgar's Queen of the King's Game, which is probably a cardinal sin for a female fan of female chesplayers! I have, in short, little familiarity with the genre of chessplayer biographies. What then, could I possibly write about Silver Queen?

Plenty - as it turns out! I've lost count of the drafts that I wrote (and tore up as totally unsatisfactory!) The problem I've been wrestling with is how to frame a review of a book written by a female author about a female chessplayer in a way that will make it interesting to the larger, primarily male audience who buys and reads books written overwhelmingly by male chessplayers for male chessplayers. The only reason you're reading this now is because I was shamefully behind schedule on delivering the completed product to The Chess Cafe and I had to commit to a final version. So - here goes.

After I agreed to read Silver Queen I wondered - who is Maria Ivanka? I'd heard of the book, of course( avid fan of the game that I am), shortly after the English-language version was published, but I'd never heard of Ivanka. Hers is not a name that comes to mind when thinking about great chessplayers who happen to be female (Menchik, Gaprindashvili, Cramling, Xie Jun, etc.) I was tempted to do a Google search to see if I could find out anything about this chessplaying woman, but I thought that might be cheating before I even cracked open her book, so I opened the book and started reading, and let Ivanka acquaint me with herself in her own way, in her own time.

Ivanka was born in 1950 in post-WWII Hungary, where her parents returned after being displaced during the war. Her family's origins were upper-middle class but the Communist government soon confiscated her father's goldsmith's business; details are lacking but perhaps this was a consequence of a government crackdown after the populist 1956 uprising against the Communist regime. After the loss of her father's business, he went to work in a government-controlled enterprise for slave wages. Throughout Ivanka's childhood her family faced unrelenting poverty while striving to maintain the facade of their former middle class lifestyle. Ivanka writes poignantly about the lengths to which her mother went to hide their dire poverty. But while the Communists stripped away all vestiges of material wealth from an entire generation of Hungarians, they could not strip Ivanka's family of its heritage of intellectual wealth. There were - somehow contrived - music lessons, dancing lessons, piano lessons. And chess. Ivanka's father and two brothers played chess, and she grew up intimately acquainted with the game. Officially, however, Ivanka's first game was at age eleven.

I won't reveal the details of her first "official" game, but Ivanka hit the ground running and after that, there was no holding her back. Ivanka embarked upon a career that spanned 30 years and four decades, before retiring from her professional career in the early 1990's. She was Hungarian Women's Champion nine times (1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1986); Ivanka earned her IM title in 1968 and her WGM title in 1978; she participated in numerous Olympiads, zonal and inter-zonal competitions, holding her own and triumphing against some of the greatest female chess players of the period. During this time Ivanka also earned a college degree, married a fellow-chessplayer (who later became a computer engineer) and bore three sons; when her husband moved back and forth between Hungary and the United States in the 1970's-'80's, to pursue educational opportunities, Ivanka endured months of separation while trying to maintain their home in Hungary with the babies, very little income, and all the while continuing to play professional chess. Ivanka and the children joined her husband in America on two occasions for extended periods during these years. Ivanka rarely missed a step, continuing to compete both in American tournaments and crossing the Atlantic numerous times to participate in European tournaments, zonals, inter-zonals and Olympiads.

By the end of her professional career, Ivanka was worn out, not only from the constant travel and non-stop guilt she felt for leaving her husband and children behind for weeks and sometimes months at a time, but also from years of battles with a system of political and chess bureaucrats who took the fine art of idiocy and nepotism to new heights. ,Too, during the later part of Ivanka's career, chess was changing. When Ivanka began her career, adjourned games and month-long tournaments were the norm:

In the 70's and 80's there were lots of great tournament opportunities, with only one round a day, traditional time control, and rest days - although with small monetary prizes. The organizers pampered the players. Sightseeing, excursions, theatre programs, and banquets made those events more memorable.

But playing conditions and accommodations were often horrendous, and Silver Queen is filled with plenty of horror stories replete with no running water for drinking or washing, bedbugs aplenty, suffocating heat, freezing cold, and holes in the ground over which one had to squat in place of toilets! Adjourned games were a part of this world that no longer exists. Ivanka recounts several of her own adjourned games as well as those of other players, and provides fascinating details of sleepless, caffeine-fueled nights spent strategizing and analyzing endless lines of play in the days before computers made Kasparov famous.

Ivanka was also facing a new generation of young, eager chessplayers who had little knowledge of, or respect for, her many career accomplishments, and an Hungarian public who cared little about what she had sacrificed over the years in order to earn her numerous titles, and gold and silver medals on behalf of her beloved Hungary. I believe it was this, as much as the changes that chess was undergoing, that led Ivanka to retire in the early 1990's.

The autobiographical details of Ivanka's life are engrossing, but Silver Queen isn't just a personal memoir of Ivanka's career or a collection of her best games. What makes this book doubly compelling is how much of Ivanka's life is played out against a backdrop of a turbulent, exciting period in history; within its pages are captured vignettes tracing the course of a family and country caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of WWII until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990's. Ivanka was there, an eye-witness. Her narrative is interwoven with details of this historic time. The Cold War was played out upon the chess board of the Fischer versus Spaasky match for the world championship; later, what we now know was an epic internal struggle for the soul of the Soviet Empire was being played out in the multiple matches between Karpov and Kasparov for the world championship. Ivanka's book intimately portrays this period in history through its impact on herself and her chessplaying contemporaries.

I found Silver Queen to be uniquely structured. There are several introductory "reviews" before the Preface, mostly by Hungarian celebrities with whom I am not familiar. Perhaps it's my American sensibilities, but I thought these reviews were unnecessary and distracted me from getting to where I wanted to be - the beginning of the story. I don't think they add anything of substance to Silver Queen, and the reader may skip the reviews and go directly to the Introduction on page 13, written by Ivanka. Here she explains why she titled the book Silver Queen. I'm not giving anything away by telling you it's because she won the Silver Queen trophy a couple of times at Wijk aan Zee (1971, 1974), or that she played on Hungarian Olympiad teams that four times took home the silver medal (1969, 1978, 1980, 1986).

After the final chapter of the text on page 266 is an index containing a chronological list of the highlights of Ivanks'a playing career. After that is an index of games that Ivanka used through the book, both her own games and those of others that she selected as indicative of the times in which she's played. There is an index to openings and also an index of players to which Ivanka referred to in her narrative. The book closes with an extensive 32-page photo gallery of Ivanka's family and playing career. I referred to these resources multiple times while reading the book, and found them helpful in fleshing out Ivanka's narrative. I do think, though, that the text would have been better highlighted by having the relevant photographs from Ivanka's life strategically placed throughout the narrative.

I'll be honest - I found the book a slow-start. But once I got into Ivanka's teen years, the book is a non-stop read. Ivanka does not shy away from expressing controversial opinions as, for instance, regarding "why male players have better results in chess than females" (page 110 et seq):

I had an interesting conversation on this subject in a TV program with a well-known psychologist, Jeno Ranschburg. He emphasized women's focus on family relationships, compared to men's outside interest and fighting character that reaches back to several thousand years. Kasparov made a statement on this same issue many years later in 1990 saying that chess is a tough sport that needs intense fighting spirit, great physical condition, and concentration. In these areas, women cannot reach the level of men.

Ivanka's games with the great Gaprindashvili are a recurring theme through the first two-thirds of the book and a thrilling counterpart to the continuing symphony of chess that represents Ivanka's 30-year career. Time and again, Ivanka met Gaprindashvili, both in regular tournaments and in Olympiads. During these meetings, Gaprindashvili was the strongest female player in the world; but Ivanka played well above her "ELO" - which, in her case, I believe grossly underestimated the strength of her will to win and her gut instincts for just damn good chess. Here is one of their games [from page 116, annotated PGN game omitted here], where the Hungarian team was fighting for the gold medal in the 1974 Olympiad in Medellin:  Ivanka went on to win an individual gold medal for her performance of 10/10 on First Board at the Medellin Olympiad.

Ivanka travelled in pre-9/11 days, when one could race up to a gate at 2 a.m. dragging multiple bags of luggage and gain entry to a plane without flashing identification or undergoing an invasive (and sometimes humiliatingly personal) search of one's luggage and person. She writes about swinging a newborn in a hammock above seats on an 18-hour transoceanic flight as well as breastfeeding a baby in between rounds at an Olympiad. The chapters covering the long-distance commutes between Hungary and Texas are particularly breath-catching - literally! More than once I found myself panting for breath in sympathy with the frantic, non-stop pace of these years in Ivanka's life.

For all her focus upon the personal, Ivanka doesn't neglect to give her readers plenty of insights into the greater world of chess as it unfolded during her playing years. A cameo of Goichberg, for instance, (from the 1986 World Open in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) is priceless - picture the petite Ivanka confronting a grossly-overweight Goichberg dressed in a caftan seated upon a throne "holding court" at the conclusion of the tournament, where she demanded to be reimbursed for her grandmaster expenses... . She also presents the Polgars in a way that only a native Hungarian could - from the inside. While neither denigrating the playing-strength of the Polgars nor engaging in petty personal attacks upon them, she has plenty to say about the blatant politics in Hungary at the time the Polgars first arrived upon the chessplaying scene that led to their elevation in the international chess scene. I had my eyes opened, particularly, with respect to Mr. Polgar. To say the least, he does not come across as a "pleasant" personality!

I found Ivanka's book enlightening and uplifting. Several times I also found myself agreeing with her observations about the state of chess today:

Today...even at tournaments of high importance and with extremely high prize-money, there is a crazy rush, reduced playing time, and often more than one round per day. Being originally an artistic game, chess has gradually turned first in a scientific, then in a commercial direction. ... The break-up of the World Championship system, the popularization of hectic mass-tournaments, and giving speed chess unjustified high importance result in a constant decline in the quality of our beautiful game.

Ultimately, Silver Queen is about the positive events that Ivanka has experienced in her life because of her love of chess. She has had a wonderful life as a professional chessplayer, travelling all over the world, doing what she loved to do (playing marvelous chess), and she did this at a time when "women's lib" was a concept just being born in the western world.

Ivanka has done it all - career woman, student, wife, mother, author - and she's done it very well, indeed. Ivanka was a superwoman before the term was invented. I think the best part of Ivanka's story is that she is only in her early 50's. She's hitting the prime years of her life and I would love to see her resume her chessplaying career, this time, on behalf of her adopted country, the United States.

Silver Queen demonstrates that politicos and political systems come and go, but chess and the love of chess remain forever. Both male and female readers of Silver Queen will appreciate Ivanka's quest that reveals this ultimate truth.