Susan Polgar, a Jewish Hungarian-American grandmaster, was traveling with a student to the International Chess Federation’s Youth World Championship in Egypt, with a stop in Tel Aviv, on Oct. 7, 2023. “Like many others, I was forced to turn around,” the 55-year-old told JNS.
“I was in total shock that in my lifetime, in the 21st century, such a brutal tragedy can take place as it did on Oct. 7. There are no words that could describe my personal feelings,” she said. “I have many family members and friends who live in Israel. My thoughts and prayers are with them daily.”
She was referring to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel that day that left 1,200 people dead and 251 others kidnapped into the Gaza Strip.
To Polgar, chess could be an “ideal platform for looking at the world.”
“It teaches us to properly assess dangers from every side at all times, and the right way to neutralize potential threats and dangers,” she told JNS. “It is better to settle differences on the chess board than on the battlefield. But when wars are unavoidable, chess can serve as a useful tool to teach war tactics and strategies, as some countries have already done.”
Polgar, whose younger sisters Judit Polgar, 48 (grandmaster), and Sofia Polgar, 50 (international master), are also renowned chess players, was, at age 15, the top-ranked female player globally. She was the women’s world champion from 1996 to 1999. In 2007, she founded an eponymous institute for chess excellence at Webster University in St. Louis.
In 1991, Polgar became the first woman to earn the men’s grandmaster title. (Judit Polgar, her sister, is widely thought to be the strongest woman chess player ever.)
Grand Central Publishing is slated to publish Susan Polgar’s 352-page memoir Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny and the Making of a Grandmaster on March 11, during Women’s History Month.
Polgar, who immigrated to the United States in 1994, told JNS about growing up in Budapest during the Cold War.
“My family lived a simple life,” she said. “By American standards, we were dirt poor. We didn’t have a car and never went to restaurants.”
When she traveled to chess tournaments in the 1980s, she and her sisters packed Hungarian salami and canned sardines, which they had with local bread.
“That was all we could afford,” she said. “But having a loving family and a purpose to aim towards made it all fine, and at the end of the day, it was worth it.”
Her family experienced “vicious antisemitism,” she told JNS.
Critics often referred to her family as less than truly Hungarian. “This was a not-so-subtle way of saying ‘Jewish,’” she said. “Nobody would ever express such antisemitism to us directly. But we knew from friends and allies that such attitudes were in the air.”
One day, her father came home from work to find a strange letter in the mail with no return address.
“Inside was a photo of him with his eyes cut out,” Polgar told JNS. “There was also a one-page, handwritten letter which he refused to let me read. He only said that it was dripping with antisemitic remarks and violent threats.”
Polgar threw herself into her chess—a game with which she fell in love shortly after she turned 4.
She was motivated to prove wrong those who believed that girls weren’t smart enough to compete in chess with boys.
In 1974, when she was 5, Polgar’s parents signed her up to play in a Budapest elementary-school district qualifier in the section for boys. “Their reasoning was pretty straightforward,” she told JNS. “For me to keep improving, I needed to play against better opponents.”
She won the tournament without losing a single game.
Winning the event typically qualified a player for the city’s elementary-school championship, but the “Budapest Chess Federation had other ideas,” Polgar said.
“The organization’s president was a strict believer in the game’s gender line. He didn’t like that a 5-year-old girl had even entered the boys’ district qualifier, much less that I had swept the field,” she told JNS. “As far as he was concerned, it didn’t matter how convincingly I had earned my spot at the championship.”
The organization president had Polgar’s name removed weeks before the competition. Some 12 years later, Polgar again was barred from competing in a men’s world championship despite being the first woman to qualify for the event’s first stage.
“There was no official rule to this effect. The federation just didn’t want me playing,” she said.
She shared advice with JNS that she has for young women who want to play competitive chess.
“Don’t believe anyone who says, ‘You cannot be as good as the guys,’” she said. “It is all about passion, hard work, patience and perseverance.”