Edward Lasker
Chicago
1517 East 61st Str
Dec. 14th 1921
Major Howard B. Oursler
Ponca City,
Oklahoma,
Dear Sir:
I am glad to send you my autograph as per your request. The autographed signature of Emanuel Lasker, to whom I am not related but who is a very good friend of mine, I have not among my letters just now and I do not know when I shall have it as he is a bad correspondent. But if you will write to him yourself I am sure he will send you his autograph. His address is: Ascaffenburger Str. 6a, Berlin Wilm., Germany.
Yours very sincerely,
Edward Lasker
This was brought to you by Mr. Lawrence Totaro of Ultimate Chess Collecting.
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Edward and Emanuel Lasker where in fact very distantly related, as shown in the posting I made in another thread.
*
Edward Lasker wrote in his memoirs of the New York 1924 tournament as published in the March 1974 edition of Chess Life magazine: “I did not discover that we were actually related until he (Emanuel Lasker) told me shortly before his death that someone had shown him a Lasker family tree on one of whose branches I was dangling.”
*
At the time of this letter, Edward himself was not aware that he was related to Emanuel.
Some sources claim that Emanuel Lasker was, if anything, Edward’s seventh cousin. If true, that relationship might very well have been unknown to Edward in 1921.
Thanks for sharing this, Susan!
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in the deep of the net i found following interesting letters about the arrangement of the correspondence match of Ed. Lssker with Mr.Rechtman. i enjoyed reading them – hopefully you will also do!
MORDECHAI RECHTMAN:
BASSOONIST AND CHESS MASTER
Dr. Joel Altman
Foxboro, Massachusetts
(The following series of letters is reprinted from the “Letters Section” of the August, 1981 issue of Chess Life Magazine, reprinted with the kind permission of the publication). They are self explanatory and display yet another facet to the broad background of Mordechai Rechtman, principal bassoonist of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. You chess enthusiasts should be particularly interested in this. In a recent letter to IDRS President, Sol Schoenbach, Mr. Rechtman noted that he is currently playing a correspondence game with 70 years old Samuel Reshevsky who is qualified for the World Cup IV semi finals group 3, Chess Championship. Ed.)
Dear Mr. Hoban:
It was not until last evening when I learned of Edward Lasker’s passing, after conversations with Harry Lyman and Arthur Bisguier on the telephone. Wonderful memories are still fresh in my mind of my 3 1/2 hours visit with Mr. Lasker in his apartment on March 10 of this year.
I thought it would be of service to our chess community and to Chess Life to submit what I believe to be the final (correspondence) game of Edward Lasker — still incomplete at the time of his death — an “unfinished symphony” so to speak! It was being played against my very dear friend Mordechai Rechtman, principal bassoonist of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. I send to you a copy of Lasker’s touching and beautiful letter to me, agreeing to play the game with Mordechai — also a copy of an aerogram by Mordechai to me while he was in Montreal giving master classes last month. He had just spoken to Lasker by telephone about the game — and the subsequent letter of March 18 confirms the position through 20 moves. At the moment I cannot locate the most recent move (and final ones) of 21.Q-B2 and 21 . . .B-Q1.
I hope you will consider publishing the game as a final tribute (a last “snapshot” of Lasker’s chess) to your dear friend over the years and my “newly found” friend — Edward Lasker.
Dear Mr. Altman:
Your suggestions that I play a correspondence game with your friend Mordechai Rechtman has raised quite a problem for me, because I have all my life had somehow more writing to do than my spare time permitted me, but as Mr. Rechtman is a musician, and music has always been my main hobby and I have certainly devoted more time to listening to it than to playing chess, I am glad to accept your proposal. However, I have never played chess professionally, and I will of course not charge a fee for playing a game with Mr. Rechtman. I am 94 years old, and having retired from serious tournament play almost 30 years ago, I doubt that I will be able to give our friend the masterful opposition he may expect. When invited to take part in a match now and then in these years against an opponent playing for some foreign team, I am sorry I have usually played rather badly, no doubt partly because of my age one thinks considerably more slowly than one used to before a few thousand neurons a day started to quit and were not automatically regenerated.
At any rate, I will try to answer every move I receive no later than the following day and to play a lively game so that it will be likely to end before I do myself.
Kindest regards,
Edward Lasker
P.S. I see you were present at the Manhattan Chess Club during the London New York match in which Sir Philip Stuart Milner-Barry played a King’s Gambit against me. On my last trip to Europe I called on him and we had lunch together. He told me he has made a special study of that opening and I had chosen a lost variation. No wonder, for I had never played the opening myself, as far as I could remember, except perhaps when I was a boy at school.
Would you kindly ask your friend to have someone in Ramat-Aviv hold a white and a black pawn in his hands and have him choose the color he will play? If he draws White, he could give me his first move when he writes me his first message.
(source: idrs.colorado.edu/…/DR/DR5.1/rechtman.html)
Ken,
It is nice you mentioned Edward’s little tidbit, but we cannot simply take his word for it as authors will write anything to leave the reader in a mysterical state.
Until we know who that “someone” is and locate the exact primary source of the “Lasker family tree” there is no evidence to support your claim. Re-quoting something form a book by an author is not anything but merely secondary truth wihtout verification.
In that case, both Lasker’s were not related and again, you cannot tell us exactly how “distant” they really were.
Ken,
Did you mean to write that you re-wrote what Wikipedia wrote?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lasker
I also have the magazine in the attic as I used to collect lots of chess magazines. I will see if I can dig it out and scan it for you. 🙂
Excellent! I think many bloggers will enjoy it.
Best wishes,
Susan Polgar
http://www.PolgarChess.com
i wonder whether the Lasker’s of Berlinchen (nowadays poland) and the Lasker’s of Kempten (bavaria at that times, and – surprisingly – still nowadays) should have had any other relationships, than the Meier’s from Hamburg(still germany), with the Meier’s from Munich (still bavaria nowadays)…
in addition i believe, Emanuel Lasker should be rated as polish, british or us world chess champion (he lies burried at Beth Olom at Queens in New York – i managed to visit his grave about 10 years ago .. ) and Eduard (please excuse my mentioning his birth name) Lasker, as a strong master from New York …
“Germany” – misconducted by the “Sieg Heil” shouts of the Nazis – does not deserve a chess world champ, like Emanuel Lasker, or a Siegbert Tarrasch (also on jewish roots) and as well not a “son” like Eduard Lasker from Kempten.
yours Vohaul
Somewhere I saw side-by-side images of their two signatures (maybe in E.Winter’s book?).
Their signatures looked eerily similar.
I take that similarity as an interesting curiousity, but not as evidence for anything.
G
@G – the last anonym – there is a pic from a tournament in NY
http://www.worldchessnetwork.com/
English/chessHistory/salute/kings
/images/laskerNY.jpg
with autographs – i do not own the original – but the players signed the photograph – maybe it is the pic you have in mind.
sincerly
Ken,
Your decision to believe otherwise is highly respectable but the burden of proof is on you to prove it since you believe it.
Simply taking that quote from online or a book doesn’t justify (your belief) nor verify (the fact). Only time will tell when more sources and technology become available.
” Anonymous said…
Ken,
Your decision to believe otherwise is highly respectable but the burden of proof is on you to prove it since you believe it.
Simply taking that quote from online or a book doesn’t justify (your belief) nor verify (the fact). Only time will tell when more sources and technology become available.”
I really don’t understand why I have to prove anything. I have posted what I believe to be true. I am quite happy for you to think otherwise. I don’t ask you to disprove it since you don’t believe it!