Author: Norm Pollock
Date: 12:22:09 07/16/04
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The following portion of the above philly.com article indicates that Bobby Fischer's biological father was probably Paul Nemenyi: ... Agents made it their business to find out who Fischer's father was. They checked his birth certificate; it listed his father as Gerhardt Fischer. He and Regina Wender had married in Moscow in 1933. They divorced in 1945, two years after Bobby's birth, but the FBI believed they had been apart longer than that. Regina Fischer came here in 1939; the FBI said her husband never entered the United States. The FBI file says Gerhardt Fischer lived for a time in Chile, where he sold fluorescent lights and worked as a photographer. The FBI suspected he might have been a Soviet spy there in World War II, targeting Nazis. The evidence? In a letter to Regina Fischer, he had made what the FBI called a "cryptic" reference to photographing fishermen at a Chilean port. The file noted that several German agents had been arrested there, posing as fishermen. The FBI seemed to pay more attention to Regina Fischer's Hungarian friend, Paul Nemenyi. Nemenyi came to the United States in the 1930s, taught college mathematics, and met Regina Fischer in 1942, according to the files. An informant told the bureau that in 1947, Nemenyi opined that the Soviet system was "superior to that of the U.S." Nemenyi also took a deep interest in Bobby Fischer. He paid child support and complained to social workers about the way Regina was raising the boy. A social worker told the FBI of interviewing Nemenyi in 1948. This informant dutifully reported that as they spoke about Regina, Nemenyi had wept. The heavily censored files don't say whether Nemenyi was Fischer's father. Letters obtained by The Inquirer offer an answer. They are the papers of Nemenyi's late son Peter, a civil-rights activist who gave them to a state archive in Wisconsin. "I take it you know that Paul was Bobby Fischer's father," Peter Nemenyi wrote after his father's death in 1952. The papers also include a plaintive letter that same year from Regina Fischer to Peter Nemenyi. "Bobby... was sick 2 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." ... ------------------------------------------- If Nemenyi was his biological father, then Bobby Fischer was 100% Jewish at birth. If it was Gerhardt, Bobby Fischer was 50% Jewish at birth. http://www.jinfo.org/Chess_Champions.html (see bottom footnote)
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