Every Christmas, for most of my adult life, I have sat down with my father to play chess. He always wins. This is not a story about dramatic reversals. My ELO rating, if I had one, would probably be negative. We play, he wins, we talk. That is the tradition. We have let it slip a little in recent years, with kids and visitors and the usual holiday traffic, but when we manage it, he still wins.
After one of those games, years ago, the conversation drifted to a great-great-uncle of mine, Jacques Mieses. My father told me pieces of his story.
What got me, even as a kid, was the geography. I was growing up behind the Iron Curtain. My world ran from the Thüringer Wald to the Baltic. Mieses had played chess in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Monte Carlo, New York, London. Those names were on the other side of a wall that had been there my whole short life. An uncle who had moved freely across that map, decades before I was born, felt almost mythical.
On one occasion my father pulled out a folder of family notes. They had been written by Julius Mieses, Jacques’ father, and they reached further back than I had expected. How the family had come west from Brody, through Breslau, to Leipzig. How they had settled into the Jewish bourgeoisie there in the late nineteenth century. How they had educated their kids. How one of those sons had come to chess. I borrowed the folder. I think I was supposed to give it back at some point.
That was my first encounter with the actual material.
Around the same time, in the late nineties, I was teaching myself HTML. The web was new, or at least new to me, and the prevailing idea back then was that the internet was finally going to make information findable. People with niche knowledge could publish for the few people in the world who happened to share their interest. That was the deal. You put up a page and the right reader, somewhere, would eventually arrive.
So I built a small site about Jacques Mieses. The first version of mieses.info. I had a famous uncle, sort of, and family papers, and access to a publishing platform for free, and the assumption that someone in the world would care.
It turned out that some people did. Over the years the site grew, in fits and starts, mostly when I had a quiet weekend or when somebody emailed me a question I had to answer properly.
Then life happened. I worked as a developer, then moved into management. I wrote less code and more documents. Strategy papers, performance reviews, change emails, promotion documents, proposals for new projects and features, the long Slack messages people send at eleven at night to clarify a thing nobody asked about. Mieses sat on the website, the website sat on a server, and neither of us got much attention.
What changed was a technical modernization of the site, of all things. I was migrating things, cleaning up, and along the way I came across a collection that had recently been catalogued at the Center for Jewish History in New York: the Hanna de Mieses Family Collection. Among other things, it contains letters Jacques wrote in the last years of his life, from London, to relatives who had emigrated to Buenos Aires.
I started reading them and could not stop.
There is one from late February 1947. He has just turned 82. He is writing from a rented room in Hampstead. He has an infected wound on his foot that is being treated with penicillin injections, which were still novel in postwar England, and his birthday will be spent largely in bed. The previous year his old apartment building was sold and converted into a hospital. The struggle for existence, as he puts it in his slightly nineteenth-century way, has become quite hard. He thanks his cousin Léonie for her warm letter. Then, with the deadpan he keeps up across the whole correspondence, he asks her again when exactly her seventy-fifth birthday will be. He has asked her this question before. More than once, in fact, across more than a year. She has not answered yet. It seems to amuse him.
What I found in the letters was not the chess grandmaster. It was an old man, displaced, holding the family together through paper. He writes from one attic after another in Hampstead. He moves four times in seven years. He plays in tournaments at 83, 84, 85, and wins beauty prizes against players half a century younger. He receives food parcels from Buenos Aires and worries that the senders are being too generous. He misses Leipzig. He maintains, into his ninth decade, what reads like a one-man correspondence network across three continents.
His real family had been mostly destroyed. Some murdered in the Holocaust, others scattered to Stockholm, Cairo, Cheltenham, Buenos Aires. What he has left is the chess world, where he is among the oldest people anyone has heard of and an honoured guest, and the letters, which keep arriving and going out at a steady rate until two years before his death.
That is the man I had been failing to write about for thirty years.
The other thing I noticed, returning to the material with adult eyes, was that the obvious book did not exist. There are passing mentions of Mieses in chess histories. There is a fine essay by Michael Negele in the German chess magazine Karl. There is no full biography of him in any language. This is not unusual for second-tier historical figures, but Mieses is also a small case study in something larger that has not been written well: the Jewish presence in early professional chess, and how that world ended. There is a gap in the historiography of Jewish chess and exile, and this life sits inside it.
So now I am writing a biography. The plan is to publish it in early 2027, in German first, through my own small imprint with a print-on-demand backbone. There will be an English edition if I can find a partner for it.
I am not naturally a long-form writer. I started my career writing code, and I now spend my days writing the kind of management prose that has to be both clear and politically survivable. But it occurred to me at some point that those years of writing were a quiet apprenticeship. The skills do not transfer perfectly. A book is not a memo, no matter how long the memo. I am learning that as I go.
This blog has been mostly quiet for a while, because the kind of programming and open-source posts I used to write here have given way to other work. So now and then, I expect, I will write here about the book and the things around it. The archive work, the surprises in the letters, the technical side of running a small bilingual research site at a depth most people would not bother with. None of that replaces what this blog has been. It just adds another room.
If you are reading this and you happen to know something about Jacques Mieses that I might not, or you want to be told when the book comes out, the project lives at mieses.info, with a page about the book and a newsletter you can sign up for there.
The next post is going to be about transcribing nineteenth-century handwriting with help from a model that has no idea what year it thinks it is. The results were better than they had any right to be.
For now, thanks for reading. My father still wins.