Saturday, January 7, 2017

Kol Ha'Am and Chess

Source: Kol Ha'Am, Sept. 11th, 1950, p. 10

Our new year resolutions are to make contact with an alien civilization and be more proactive. We consider the former to be more realistic, in terms of its chances of success, but we'll start here by giving the latter a shot, too.

On our desk (OK, on our desktop) there are a bunch of interesting items from a frequent correspondent of ours. We thank him, and at long last will publish a selection of them which would be of special interest, we think, to readers of this blog.

The first on the list is the above item. Kol Ha'Am, lit. 'The People's Voice' (קול העם -- also written in English as Kol Ha'am, Kol HaAm, etc.) was the Israeli Communist Party's paper. It too had a chess column, edited by Jozsef Hajtun (Gaige's spelling in Chess Personalia).

It shows the growing interest in chess in the country that even a paper of a very small party had a chess column. This being a communist party organ, the chess reporting was politically influenced -- here, reporting on how the participants in the memorial tournament to Dawid Przepiórka had all publicly signed the Stockholm Appeal, and that a declaration to that effect was read by Bondarevsky at the tournament.

Whatever one thinks of the genuineness or lack thereof of this appeal, it has nothing to do with chess itself -- yet was the first item in the report on the tournament in Kol Ha'Am; then came the description fo the tournament, and finally a single game (Zita - Barcza, 0-1). The writing is indeed, as our correspondent notes, 'in communist style'.

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