As wartime stay-at-homes took to their chessboards last week, Samuel Reshevsky, onetime child prodigy, for the fourth successive time won the biennial U.S. chess championship.
If thin-haired, bespectacled, 31-year-old Reshevsky lived in present-day Russiawhere chess is the national pastime and people jam the streets to watch the moves of championship matches on giant dummy boardshe would be a national hero. But in the U.S., where chess has no more spectator appeal than calisthenics, Reshevsky is just another guy named Sam.
When Sam came to the U.S. from his native Poland at the age of nine, he lived up to his triumphant European...
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