Rubinstein Gewinnt! - German Edition

NOTE: THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN GERMAN

This is not merely a great book. It is an important piece of chess history, because the author Hans Kmoch visited the Rubinstein Family Home in 1933 in an effort to get the great grandmaster of chess to return to active play. When Rubinstein could not be induced to return, his family who was living in dire poverty asked Kmoch for help in raising funds. The result was an ad placed asking to finance this book on a subscription basis. The result was a book entitled “Rubinstein gewinnt! : Hundert Glanzpartien des grossen Schachknstlers. Erläutert von Hans Kmoch. Biographische Einleitung von Jacques Hannak. Verlag der Wiener Schachzeitung, Wien 1933”

Hans Kmoch was born on July 25, 1894 in Vienna Austria. He was an International Chess Master who played in many of the strongest tournaments of the 1920s and 1930s, including Vienna 1922 and San Remo 1930. He played on the Austrian Olympiad teams of 1927, 1930 and 1931. He moved to Amsterdam in 1932 and then to the USA in 1947. Here Hans Kmoch is remembered primarily as a writer rather than as a player of chess. He wrote a monthly column in Chess Review magazine entitled “Games from Recent Events”. The column offered several games from the latest tournaments and was both entertaining and instructive. Kmoch also became manager of the Manhattan Chess Club, a position he held from at least 1964 until just before his death in 1973. I got to know him after the 1964 US Open in Boston. As I had been rooming with future grandmaster Duncan Suttles at the US Open, I was able to give Kmoch the scoresheets of two of Suttles' games, Benko vs. Suttles and Hoppe vs. Suttles. Kmoch proceeded to publish both games in Chess Review magazine, along with his annotations. Kmoch then invited me to an otherwise all master round robin tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club. I was the only non-master invited and I was thankful to Kmoch for giving me this chance. However, I only won two of the games, losing all the rest. I last saw Hans Kmoch on the steps of New york City Hall in September 1972. He and I had both been invited to attend the ceremony where Bobby Fischer was given the Key to the City by Mayor John Lindsay after Fischer had returned from Iceland where he had won the Fischer Spassky Match. Us invited guests were then invited to a reception held inside City Hall. Every body else rushed up the steps, except for Hans Kmoch who was feeble and walking only with a walker. Seeing Kmoch at the bottom of the steps alone, I went down and helped him up the steps and into City Hall. He died five months later on February 13, 1973 in New York City.