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Regina Fischer |
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But by
the time of Bobby's birth, Regina had moved to Chicago, while Nemenyi
was
teaching in Rhode Island. She gave birth to her son alone, in a clinic
for poor
single mothers. And on the birth certificate, she listed Fischer as the
father.
She briefly considered putting her newborn son up for adoption. But in
talking
to a social worker - who would later share the story with the FBI - she
broke
down and cried, unable to go through with it. "Joan
was there, but mostly Bobby was just on his own and Regina was working,
working,
working all the time," says Allen Kaufman, a New York chess master and
childhood friend of Fischer's. "She would work 24 hours at a time, and
so
Bobby was left rattling around, mostly on his own." When
Bobby was 3, Nemenyi visited a social worker to complain about the way
Regina
was raising him. By then, he and Regina had split, and he was living in
Washington. Regina was "mentally upset," and Bobby was an "upset
child," he told the caseworker, apparently without results. Two years
later, Nemenyi sought help again, telling a social worker that his son
was
"not being brought up in desirable circumstances, due to the
instability of
the mother." Regina
herself sought the help of social workers when Bobby was 14. She
described him
as "temperamental, unable to get along with others, without friends his
age, and without any interests other than chess." Social
workers offered guidance, but Regina wouldn't take it, preferring to
work things
out her own way. She did
not succeed. Her relationship with Bobby got so bad that they could not
live
together. In 1960, she moved out, leaving her teenage son alone in a
Brooklyn
apartment that soon grew filthy - clogged tubs, roaches, dirty dishes. The move
would usher in one of the most productive periods in Regina's life. She
remarried, and she at last got her medical degree, in East Germany. She
used
that degree to altruistic purpose, providing medical care on American
Indian
reservations in the Southwest and working as an emergency-room
physician in
Nicaragua in the 1980s. To
Bobby, her departure was a relief. In a 1962 interview with Harper's
magazine,
he complained that his mother was a "square." "I don't like
people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her," he said. There
may have been friction, but there was also love. The same year Regina
moved out,
she went to Washington on a mission. Outside the wrought-iron gates of
the White
House, she staged a solitary five-hour protest, urging President Dwight
D.
Eisenhower to help send a U.S team to the chess olympics in East
Germany. Bobby
would wind up leading a U.S. team to the tournament in Leipzig. "She
was a fierce lawyer and supporter and protagonist of Bobby," Kaufman
says.
"And in the beginning, that was very valuable. And then eventually it
embarrassed Bobby. For that and other reasons, he broke with her." By the
end of her life, mother and son had reconciled. Susan Polgar, a
Hungarian
grandmaster whose family befriended Bobby in the early '90s, said at
the time
that the two were speaking regularly by phone. Regina
died in 1997, at 84, near her daughter in Palo Alto, Calif. (The FBI
had closed
her case years before, concluding she was not a spy. Agents never
seemed quite
sure of what to make of her.) The complexity of the mother-son relationship emerged in the 1962 Harper's interview. At one point Bobby displayed the anti-Semitism that would become his fixation in middle age. He said chess was peopled with too many Jews, who dressed poorly and detracted from the "class of the game." The interviewer asked, "You're Jewish, aren't you?" "Part Jewish. My mother is Jewish." After
Paul's death, Regina Fischer's life was desperate. He had been paying
for
8-year-old Bobby's education and sending $20 a week. She had long since
divorced
Gerhardt Fischer, who had never lived with her in the United States.
She was in
nursing school in Brooklyn, broke and facing eviction. Regina wrote to
Peter
Nemenyi, who was then getting his doctorate in math at Princeton. She
asked if
any money had been set aside for Bobby. "Bobby has not had a decent
meal at
home this past month and was sick two days with fever and sore throat,
and of
course a doctor or medicine was out of the question," she wrote. "I
don't think Paul would have wanted to leave Bobby this way and would
ask you
most urgently to let me know if Paul left anything for Bobby." From “Life is not a board”. By Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson Regina
Pustan, physician
and activist
Regina
Pustan, a physician and political activist and a 24-year resident of
Palo Alto,
died July 26 at Stanford University Hospital. She was 84. Pustan,
who fled the
Soviet Union with the outbreak of World War II, was the mother of world
chess
champion Bobby Fischer. Pustan
was born in
Switzerland and raised in St. Louis, Mo., where she graduated from high
school
at age 15. She attended Washington University and received her
bachelor's degree
from the University of Colorado. At age 19, during the Great
Depression, she
went to Germany to join her brother Max and later moved to Moscow,
where she
attended the University of Moscow medical school. With the
outbreak of World
War II, she was unable to finish medical school when she and her
husband,
Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, were forced to flee the
Soviet
Union. She traveled across Europe with her infant daughter and caught
one of the
last ships leaving France before America joined the war. During
the war, she held a
variety of jobs, including telephone operator, welder and lathe
operator. Later,
she obtained her master's degree in public health from Columbia College
in New
York and then worked for several years as a public health nurse. At age
50, when her
children were grown, she returned to medical school in Germany, where
she
obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in hematology. She
spoke seven languages.
As a
physician, she was
concerned about the dangerous health effects of above-ground nuclear
testing,
and joined Bertrand Russell's group, the Congress on Nuclear
Disarmament, on
their year-long walk across two continents from San Francisco to
Moscow. While
abroad, she married her second husband, Cyril Pustan, in England. For
the next
15 years, she practiced pediatric medicine in London, Germany and
Portugal,
where she and her husband wrote a book about the coffee cooperatives in
the
northern part of that country, and another on using English and
American folk
songs to teach English. When her
husband died, she
returned to the United States to live near some of her children in Palo
Alto. In
her mid-70s, she traveled to Central America, where she volunteered as
a
reporter and a physician in Nicaragua and helped run a United Nations
refugee
camp in Honduras. In her 80s, she translated a book by the
prize-winning Costa
Rican author, Luisa Gonzales, "Life at the Bottom," which was later
made into a play. In her
final years, she
took language and computer classes at Foothill and Canada colleges. She
also
volunteered in support of the Linus Pauling Institute and tutored
students in
English. She is
survived by a
brother, Max Wender of Oakland; a daughter, Joan Fischer Targ of
Portola Valley;
a son, Robert James Fischer of Hungary; three grandchildren; and two
great-grandchildren. Upon her request, there will be no formal memorial
and her
body will be donated to Stanford University Medical School. by Larry Parr Fischer and his motherFor
chess people who have followed the Fischer saga, Bobby
Fischer’s relations
with his mother, Regina Fischer (nee Wender), were
those he described to
Ralph Ginzburg in a Harper’s interview of
January 1962. Said Fischer,
“She and I just don’t see eye to eye together.
She’s a square. She keeps
telling me that I’m too interested in chess, that I should
get friends outside
of chess, you can’t make a living from chess, that I should
finish high school
and all that nonsense. She keeps in my hair and I don’t like
people in my
hair, you know, so I had to get rid of her …. I
don’t have anything to do
with her.” Regina
Wender-Fischer was a remarkable and, according to those who knew her, a
remarkably intelligent, strong-willed woman who spoke at least six
languages.
This woman, who bore Bobby Fischer, was born in Switzerland in 1913,
though
herself an American citizen who grew up in St. Louis. A so-called
“Red
Diaper” baby of political radicals, she studied medicine at
the First Moscow
Medical Institute from 1933 to 1938, which were years of mass famine
and terror
in the Soviet Union. Her time in Moscow - like that of Emanuel Lasker
in the
mid-1930s - is wrapped in obscurity. She did not complete her degree,
and a
reasonable assumption is that the horrors of the Great Terror or Yezhovshchina
from 1936 to 1938 played a role in truncating her education. In 1938
she married
Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, and returned to the United
States.
Unable to continue her medical education in the States because of high
tuition
fees and few postings for female physicians, she worked as a registered
nurse
among many other jobs. During World War II she labored as a typist,
stenographer, a shipyard welder. Later, she taught elementary school.
In 1968,
at age 55, she finally earned a medical degree from Friedrich Schiller
University in East Germany. Concerning
chess, Regina Fischer both encouraged and discouraged her son from the
very
beginning, which came at age six when he learned the moves from his
sister. She
took Bobby to chess clubs, assorted exhibitions and to the outdoor
playing areas
in New York’s Central and Washington Square parks. In the
summer of 1959 she
wrote a letter to the New York Herald Tribune
soliciting funds to finance
Bobby’s chess travels. Fischer refused to touch a single cent
of the $3,000
raised. The following year she fought a public feud with the American
Chess
Foundation which she considered less than committed to sending a U. S.
team to
the 1960 Leipzig Olympiad. She made the centerfold of the New York Daily
News
by picketing the White House and State Department on behalf of sending
a team to
Leipzig. She simultaneously went on a six-day hunger strike. Fischer
seemed embarrassed by his mother’s activities. “She
doesn’t know what
she’s doing,” he told an interviewer.
“She ought to keep out of chess.”
In politics, unlike his Moskva Mama, Fischer gravitated to the Right,
displaying
what Paul Kollar has described as “a McCarthyite,
‘commie’-bashing,
jingoistic political stance,” which another writer might call
anti-totalitarian and patriotic. In
any event, Regina Fischer soon moved out of the apartment that she
shared with
Bobby to participate in an eight-month “peace”
march from San Francisco to
Moscow. Along the way she met one Cyril Pustan, got married and settled
in
England. And for most in the chess world, the final image of Fischer is
that of
a ruthless young man tossing aside the one person in the world who
loved him
unconditionally. Fischer,
however, remained in contact with Regina over the years. Eventually,
Bobby
showed all the worry and tender concern that most sons have. In a
little-known
interview with Ambassador Report in early 1977, the
world champion
expressed concern for his mother in the context of having tithed away
his
earnings to an organization called the Worldwide Church of God.
“You know,”
Fischer said, “I didn’t improve my living standard
one bit either. It
wasn’t like I just didn’t help my mom. I
didn’t do anything for myself
either. You know I don’t even have a car. About the only
luxury I got was
quite a few $400 suits. I got ten maybe. But still what I’m
saying is that
that is still not a lot of money spent on me considering all the money
I made.
It wasn’t like I was living high on the hog and neglecting my
mom, but she’s
living real poor in a crummy apartment in England. She
doesn’t even have a
bathroom. I just saw her a few months ago. I have to help my mom now.
She’s an
old woman. She could soon be gone.” From having “to get rid” of his mother to having “to help my mom now” - even Bobby, the self-described “tough player” in chess and life, genuflected before the tie of blood. Fischer :
Anybody who knows me, you know, my late mother and sister, we all are
like
packrats with all of our stuff, saving everything, you know, every..,
unbelievable, my mother's apartment, up there in Palo Alto, she
couldn't move
anymore, she was being buried alive in all the stuff she was saving.
Finally
they put it in boxes and these boxes just took over much of the
apartment. I am
not quite as bad as my mom in that regard, but I am pretty bad
too…. From one of the radio interviews Regina was a powerhouse with the energy to be father and mother both. One acquaintance has called her "a wise and devoted mother...a gifted woman with a strong social conscience." Another remembers her as "ugly, short, with a big nose. The kind of woman who telephoned you at 1 a.m. to tell you things that could have waited till the next day. A woman who thougt only of what she wanted and to have it right away." (Page 49) When she needed cash to finance Bobby's career, she
tried to set up a
wholesale business in Bobby Fischer chess wallets. Bobby Fischer vs. the rest of the World - page 49 Last Will + TestamentAugust 7, 1996, 6.15 A.M I,
Regina F. P., age 83, citizen of California, USA, hereby give and
bequeath to my
daughter Joan J. Targ, Portala Valley, CA, all my possessions,
mostly books, papers etc. and whatever else I have in my apartment at
360
Sheridan, Palo Alto. I would like Joan to give Regina
J. P. Stanford
hospital Holding Room P.S.
Also please pay Lori $20.00. Also the current phone bill. Regina |