The Polgar Variant, directed by Yossi Aviram, Israel, 2014, 68 minutes long in Hungarian, English and Hebrew with English subtitles. To be shown twice during the San Diego Jewish Film Festival: Sunday, Feb. 7, at 5 p.m. at the Edwards San Marcos Stadium 18, 1180 W. San Marcos Blvd., San Marcos; and on Thursday, Feb. 11, at 11 a.m. at the Reading Cinemas 14, 4665 Clairemont Drive, San Diego.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Hungarians Lazslo and Klara Polgar had three daughters and an idea. Genius is not a matter of happenstance; it is a matter of education. And so, they home-schooled their daughters, not only in regular subjects but in chess—six to seven hours of chess, day after day, week after week, year after year.
When the girls – Zsuzsa (Susan), Sofi and Judit—started winning chess tournaments for their age groups, they came increasingly to the attention of the Communist authorities in Hungary. Rather than taking pride in their accomplishments, the regime became angry at their parents for not enrolling the girls in regular schools where they could learn to be good Communist citizens. They accused Laszlo of being a dictator who kept his daughters in a chess prison. When Klara accompanied Zsuzsa in 1982 to a chess tournament, she found on her return that she had been fired from her job as a teacher. For a period of three years, the family’s passports were revoked.
The opposition to their activities caused the family to draw together even more closely. A family motto was “On each other you can count; on others, you don’t know.”
The Polgar Variant is built upon interviews with the three sisters and their parents, as well as with chess coaches and competitors who watched the siblings rise to the top of the women’s chess world and then knock down barriers against women competing (and winning) against men. The documentary is a fascinating portrait of a determined family which in all-for-one, one-for-all fashion supported each other, taking pride in each other’s victories, even when the sisters had to compete against one another.
In 1988, the three sisters brought back to Hungary an Olympic gold medal for chess, and thereafter they became celebrities—especially after the fall of the Communist regime a year later. Although Zsuzsa was the trail blazer, having once been ranked the top woman player in the world; it was the youngest sister Judit who became the biggest star, beating such male world champions as Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov. While the middle daughter, Sofi, was quite good at chess, she eventually began to distance herself from the game, finding pleasure in other pursuits.
The showing of the movie will be enriched by a live Skype interview with Zsuzsa Polgar, who today teaches chess in Texas, where she has made her home. Her own son, Tom, has won the juvenile chess championship of the United States, so the tradition continues, albeit not so intensely as Zsuzsa and her two sisters experienced.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)