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| Regina and Hans-Gerhardt Fischer in Russia |
By the way, another great night of casual chess at LCCC on 052217. We welcome another new member to LCCC. Great to have you here, Tony.
Bobby Fischer's mental instability was due to both genetic traits and family dynamics.
Bobby Fischer’s Jewish mother, Regina
Fischer spoke at least six languages (English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and
Portuguese) fluently and was brilliant……but a paranoid
schizophrenic. She had studied medicine
in Moscow during the Stalin era, and was very outspoken on political/social issues
in the United States. She was always under the watch of the FBI, so some of her
paranoia was warranted. The FBI was concerned that she could be a Russian spy.
Her German and Jewish husband, Hans-Gerhardt
Fischer, was a devout communist and was denied entry into the US, eventually
settled in Santiago, Chile. That is when
her relationship with a Jewish Hungarian scientist, mathematician and suspected communist, Paul
F. Nemenyi, began, and that probably did not help her situation either. Nemenyi
was Bobby Fischer's real father, and who was not listed on the birth
certificate. Hans-Gerhardt Fischer was.
1942 found Regina Fischer in Denver, Colorado which was only just a stopping place
for a restless woman who couldn't settle on a permanent home. She was taking
classes at the University of Denver and working at a company that made chicken
incubators. At 29, Regina had already lived in eight other cities and four
other countries. This was her ninth job and her sixth university. She was the mother of 5-year-old girl Joan
and she was alone.
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| Bobby Fischer (left) and Paul Nemenyi |
This is when Paul Nemenyi
appeared. Nemenyi was 47, a Hungarian refugee and a theoretical engineer
teaching at a nearby college. He made $165 a month, was an animal-rights
supporter and refused to wear wool. He
walked around in winter with his pajamas sticking out from underneath his
clothes.
Still, he had a compelling mind. "He was smart, very, very smart,"
recalls Charlotte Truesdell, who worked at a research laboratory with Nemenyi
in the '40s. "He had a strange kind of memory. He remembered things by
their shapes."
Regina was the daughter of a Polish dress cutter who had moved to the United
States with his family while she was a baby and she returned to Europe as a
young adult and studied medicine. She
lived in Berlin in the early '30s when Hitler was coming to power. It was there
that she met Fischer, with whom she moved to Moscow, where they lived for
several years under Stalin.
In Colorado in 1942, Regina and Nemenyi were drawn together by their political
beliefs. Nemenyi had told colleagues he preferred communism to capitalism and
the FBI suspected Regina of communist sympathies. Regina never revealed what happened between
them but it seems clear that in the summer of '42 a romance took place because
the next year, Bobby was born.
There is an account of the affair in the FBI file. Their investigation began in 1942 when a
baby-sitter found what she believed to be pro-communist letters belonging to
Regina and turned them over to the FBI. Nemenyi told one FBI informant, a social worker, that he met Regina at
the University of Denver. But whatever follows his account in the FBI file is
censored by the FBI. In the narrative
after that point Bobby is in the picture. The file says, "He (Nemenyi)
advised he helped support the boy."
By the time of Bobby's birth Regina had moved to Chicago and Nemenyi was
teaching in Rhode Island. She gave birth to Bobby in a clinic for poor single
mothers. And on the birth certificate she listed Fischer as the father. She
briefly considered putting Bobby up for adoption but after talking to a social
worker (who later described the conversation to the FBI) she broke down and
cried and was unable to go through with it.
She then moved into a Chicago home for fatherless families where she ended up
leading a rebellion among the other mothers, encouraging them to question the
institution's rules. The home called the police who arrested Regina and charged
her with disturbing the peace. She was acquitted. Regina divorced Fischer in 1948 and moved to
Brooklyn, New York where she worked as an elementary school teacher and nurse
at Prospect Heights Hospital in Brooklyn.
Paul Nemenyi
took a special interest in Bobby. Many times he visited, paid their rent and
sent money to Regina when he could. He even paid for the tuition for Bobby to
attend Brooklyn Community College. Paul visited often enough for Bobby to
become attached to him.
When Nemenyi
died, another son of Nemenyi - Peter, was contacted by Regina to see if any
money had been left to Bobby. When the answer was no, she would contact Peter
from time to time claiming to have no money to take the sick Bobby to the
doctor, or that she had no money for shoes for the boy. She also mentioned that
she had not told Bobby about Paul’s death and that the boy was wondering why he
was not visiting any longer.
Bobby’s only public statement about his
father appeared in Start, a Zagreb
newspaper where he said, “My father left my mother when I was two. I have never seen him. My mother has only told me that his name is
Gerhardt and that he was of German descent.”
However, later Bobby told a friend that he and his sister, Joan, did not
have the same father. Joan Fischer Targ
always insisted that her father’s name was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer. Hans Fischer died on February 25, 1993 in Berlin.
Regina (Wender) Fisher was born on
march 31, 1913 in Zurich, Switzerland and died of cancer on July 27, 1997 at
the age of 84 in the Stanford University Hospital.
Source:
Tartajubow blog and Chess Life, March 2004
