Bobby Fischer, Back From the Grave
Checkmate: Fischer?s body will be exhumed to determine who is entitled to his estimated $2 million fortune. Image by GETTY IMAGES
By Ezra Glinter June 23, 2010
Bobby Fischer was once the greatest chess player in the world, before he devolved into a ranting, rabid antisemite, despite the fact that he himself was Jewish. By the end of Fischer’s life, the only country that would have him was Iceland, where he died in 2008 of kidney failure, leaving behind some $2 million and no will. Now, The Associated Press reports, Iceland’s Supreme Court hopes that exhuming his corpse will help determine who gets the loot.
Checkmate: Fischer?s body will be exhumed to determine who is entitled to his estimated $2 million fortune. Image by GETTY IMAGES
Since Fisher’s death, four different parties have been bickering over his fortune, including a 9-year-old Philippine girl named Jinky Young who, according to her mother, Marilyn, is his daughter. The other claimants are a Japanese chess official named Miyoko Watai, who says she was married to Fischer in 2004; Fischer’s two American nephews, Alexander and Nicholas Targ, and the American government, which claims Fischer’s money in compensation for unpaid taxes.
As the New York Post explains, however, according to Icelandic law, Young would get two-thirds of the money and Watai one-third, if both of their claims turn out to be true. Genetic testing based on material from Fischer’s body should presumably determine whether Young is his daughter.
“At this point we are just trying to establish this,” said Young’s lawyer, Thordur Bogason. “And if she is confirmed as the daughter of Bobby Fischer, then by Icelandic law she is his legal heir.”
Fischer was perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of the 20th century, becoming an American champion at 14 and the youngest grand master in history at 15. In 1972, he won the World Championship against Soviet player Boris Spassky, and then dropped out of competitive chess for 20 years. Fischer incurred the ire of the American government in 1992 when he played a rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia, which was then under United Nations embargo. Instead of returning home, he lived out his final years in Hungary, Germany, the Philippines, Japan and finally Iceland, which granted him citizenship in 2005.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
