I've modified Alekhine's bio to reflect the uncertainty of Grace's background as a Jew; it is certainly a bane of the internet that a spurious contention can be propagated as a fact so many times that it becomes accepted as true.

However...

Kasparov's OMGPs are clunky and unreliable, and his machinations as a politician more than a little devious, so it's understandable that his word might be taken with a grain of salt.

But his background is Jewish, and certainly under the definitions the Nazis used, he would have been classified as a Jew. Also sites such as http://www.jinfo.org/index.html whose mission statement is to <to provide an online resource that accurately describes the Jewish contribution to the cultural, scientific, and technological evolution of civilization.> consider him a Jew. Kasparov himself might not be a devout Jew, or even consider himself to be a Jew, but he was/is part of the broader Jewish community regardless and so it could have been of some interest to him.

So in this context, his comment that Alekhine's son had considered his mother, Grace, to be a Jew may have been straightforward reportage of what Alex jnr had said, unless Kasparov lied outright...and why would he do that in this case? We know that Alex jnr regularly attended Dortmund as a spectator and was still alive as recently as 2005 when he was photographed at Dortmund, so it's not like he was inaccessible or unknown.

If that is the case, then I wouldn't buy that Alekhine wouldn't have known if his wife was a Jew (much less Grace) if his son knew, regardless of him being raised as an Episcopalian - being born a Jew doesn't guarantee their adherence to Judaism, and more than someone's background in Christianity makes them an adherent to Christianity. It probably was of no import to start with, but would have been of crucial importance later when he returned to Europe to presumably protect her and her not inconsiderable assets, including a villa the Nazis had seized for their own use, after she was denied a visa to leave. She was a dual American/British citizen, so why would an exit visa have been denied?.

The issue of Grace's Jewishness, it seems to me, comes to bear only if Alekhine's defense to the essays was that he was coerced. But Alekhine himself never asserted that defense, as <kp> has pointed out: he either admitted or denied authorship, full stop. That behavior is not consistent with coercion.

Is your point that if Grace was Jewish, and Alekhine knew this, he couldn't have been anti-semitic, not <really>? This objection is easily dealt with, I'm afraid. People marry other people that they hate all the time.

A letter from Alekhine sent to the organizers of the London Tournament 1946:

<The fact is, in Germany and in occupied territory, we were under constant supervision and the threat of the concentration camp on the part of the Gestapo... I have played Chess in Germany and occupied countries because this was our only means of livelihood, but also the price I paid for my wife's liberty. In these articles, which appeared in 1941 during my stay in Portugal, and which became known to me in Germany as reproduced in the Deutsche Schachzeitung there is nothing that was written by me. The matter which I had provided related to the necessary reconstruction of the International Chess Federation and to a critical appreciation, written long before 1939 of the theories of Steinitz and Lasker. I was astonished ... at the reaction which these purely technical articles had produced in America. It is only when I obtained knowledge of the perfectly stupid balderdash which emanated from a mind imbued with Nazi ideas, that I understood what was on foot. At that time I was a prisoner of the Nazis and our only chance was to keep silent before the whole world. The vapourings of the Pariser Zeitung were a fake.>

No worries. Did you ever get around to reading <Manthropology>? ( Kenneth Rogoff )>

I never did. In fact I forgot about it, I am sorry to say. But it (still!) sounds interesting, and I will track it down one of these days.

Some of us have our doubts about Madeline's lack of knowledge. :-)

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/...