" Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders. "

" There are only two kinds of moves in the opening, moves which are wrong and moves which could be wrong. "

<He was born in Russia but as an Austrian citizen. Though his parents were Jewish, he was christened at birth, his parents having adopted Christianity some time earlier. Jews in czarist Russia took that protective step to avoid persecution, but it failed to save Tartakower’s parents, who were murdered in a pogrom in Rostov-on-Don in 1911. His brother, who at the time was also studying in Vienna, received the news while playing chess in the Cafe Central. He flew into a rage and announced that he was leaving for Russia that very day to avenge the murders of his parents. His friends held him back only with the greatest difficulty.>

<Shortly after the war started, Tartakower’s brother was killed while serving in the Austrian army on the Russian front. Only one member of the family survived, a sister in Russia. Savielly met her for the last time when she was a spectator at the great Moscow tournament in 1925.>

And regarding Dr. Tartakower and citizenships:

<The treaty of St. Germain brought independence to the nationalities of imperial Austria. The new Austria became very small, and Vienna became a metropolis made up of suburbs. The Wiener Schachklub, whose famous president had died in 1912, moved to cheaper quarters. Its home guard of masters suddenly became a group of foreigners. Tartakower became, of all things, a citizen of the Ukrainian Republic. When that new country lost its independence, his citizenship was transferred, probably as an act of clemency, to Poland. He spoke no Polish, but he knew French, a language highly esteemed but little spoken in Poland, and that made his compatriots put aside their traditional hatred of all things Russian or German and deal with him in those languages.>

<In the early 1920s, around the time that he became a Pole by citizenship, Tartakower became a Frenchman by residence. After a quarrel with his Austrian publisher, a Russian, he angrily blamed Austria for wronging him and moved to Paris, which became his permanent home.>

Source: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kmoch...

<From Richard Forster (Winterthur, Switzerland) and Tomasz Lissowski (Warsaw):

[...]

Voronkov further showed that, contrary to what most (Western) sources state, the pogrom in which Tartakower’s parents were killed occurred not in 1899 but in 1911 (although the infamous and best-known Jewish pogroms in Rostov took place in 1905). Tartakower refers to this in one of his own poems (our translation):

One More, The Final Dissonance

(on the death of the parents)

A whole century of surrenders, tears, and strains.

And for whom? For children, who live safe

In foreign lands. If you ask them:

“Easy life, eh, old men?”, “Yes” – they answer.

Returning home in the early morning

I took and opened the telegram: “Your parents killed.”

I hurried. I buried. The iron plates

of two bloody graves lie on my heart.>

Regarding his brother Artur: <[...] who was one year his junior and also a law student at Vienna University. He died on 19 November 1914 on the battle-ground near Katowice (in Silesia, then a part of the German Empire and nowadays in Southern Poland).’>

Ketchuplover,
Here is the review of "Moral Victories":

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/revie...

I received a copy of the book as a Christmas present from my wife. I look forward to reading it over the next few months.

It was very nice of the Poles to accept him. The Poles did not particularly like Russians or Germans during that period.

Since most of Poland was essentially a Russian province until WW1, Tartakover probably felt he was just transferring from the Ukrainian part of the Russian Empire to the Polish part; and it may not have been that psychologically difficult for him to so.