ISAAC KASHDAN AMERICAN CHESS GRANDMASTER: A Career Summary with 757 games
Author: Peter Lahde
Review of Isaac Kashdan,
McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers (2009),
360 pages
$65.00
Reviewed by John Donaldson
The United States has produced many outstanding chess personalities, but for all around contributions to the game Isaac Kashdan has to rank at the very top or very close to it. This might seem to be a big claim but consider the following facts about “Kash” in no particular order:
* Considered a potential World Championship contender by no less than Alekhine in the early 1930s
* His record in five Chess Olympiads (playing top board in all but one) was 79.5 percent!
* Wrote a first rate weekly column for the Los Angeles Times for 27 years
* Directed and organized the famous Lone Pine tournaments from beginning to end ( 1971-81)
* US team captain at the 1960 (2nd place) and 1964 Chess Olympiads
* Authored a book on the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad and edited the two great Piatigorsky tournament books.
* Served as the tournament director for both Piatigorsky tournaments and the Fischer-Reshevsky match
* A first rate problem solver who won several competitions.
* Served as US FIDE Delegate in 1964 and occupied several governance positions in the USCF
* Tied for first in the 1942 US Championship and had a career record in US Championships of 71 percent bettered only by Fischer and Fine.
* Co-founded Chess Review, arguably the most important American chess magazine of all time, with Al Horowitz.
* Considered one of the great endgames experts of American chess for several decades. He was called der kleine Capablanca during his peak in the early 1930s because of his skill in the ending.
* Reported on the Fischer-Spassky match for both the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times
Kashdan planned to write a book about his best games called CHESS HOLIDAYS but it never came to pass. Thankfully the well known chess historian and writer Peter Lahde has filled a huge gap in American chess literature with the publication of Isaac Kashdan, American Chess Grandmaster: A Career Summary with 757 games, a project more than twenty years in the making.
What really makes this book something special are the dozens of games that Kashdan annotated for Chess Review in the 1930s. Played against some of the world’s best – Alekhine, Nimzovitch, Flohr, Fine, Reshevsky and Marshall to mention but a few – the games feature first-rate notes. ISAAC KASHDAN AMERICAN CHESS GRANDMASTER also benefits enormously from the goldmine of previously unpublished Kashdan scoresheets made available to Lahde by Richard Kashdan, the son of Isaac, and his cousin Teddy Seidenfeld. Chess has been made much richer by their generosity. It seems like over half the books written on the endgame feature Stoltz-Kashdan, Hague Olympiad 1928, as one of the classic model examples of the superiority of Bishop over Knight. They all start with the position after White’s 28th move because the first part of the game was lost. Now with Kashdan’s scoresheet the missing first half has been made available.
Author Lahde has done a first rate research job. Kashdan’s career, first in New York, then Europe and finally Los Angeles, is thoroughly covered. Besides the games, which make up the bulk of the book, there are 70 pages of biographical material and 30 pages devoted to his overall record with pages and pages of crosstables. McFarland has done its usual high quality job with excellent paper, library binding and a clear layout.
ISAAC KASHDAN AMERICAN CHESS GRANDMASTER is a fitting tribute too not only one of the kings of American chess but also one of its greatest gentlemen. As Jack Peters put it so well, “Kashdan was a giant of the chess world, a man with important accomplishments in every phase of the game. He was a kind and considerate man, always well mannered, who commanded respect.”
