Jacques Mieses: A Book That Started in the 1990s

Every Christmas, for most of my life, I have sat down with my father to play chess. He always wins. My Elo rating, if I had one, would probably be negative. We play, enjoy a good wine or whiskey and we talk afterward. It has been a kind of family tradition, but to be honest we have played less in recent years, with kids and visitors and the usual holiday traffic. When we manage it, we still enjoy a game.

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.

As a kid I was also fascinated by the geography in these stories. 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 multiple continents, decades before I was even born, felt almost like a made-up story.

One year, after we talked again about family history, my father pulled out some of the few Mieses family artifacts which survived roughly 100 years. One of them in particular stood out to me, a memoir that had been written by Julius Mieses, Jacques’ father, and it reached further back than I had expected. It told how the family had come west from Brody, through Breslau, to Leipzig and then settled into the Jewish bourgeoisie there in the late nineteenth century. Julius wrote about the effort they spent to educate their three kids and how the firstborn son had come to chess. Chess had already played a big role in the Mieses family for a while. Jacques’ uncle, Samuel Mieses, was a well-known chess player in his time as well and won the first prize at the 1871 Bad Ems tournament. Jacques’ cousin Viktor was his chess sparring partner in their youth and appeared as a chess problem composer a couple of times in the chess papers. I borrowed the artifacts. I think I was supposed to give them back at some point. This 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. The idea back then was that the internet was finally going to make the world a bit better and that information would be findable. People with niche knowledge could publish for others in the world who happened to share their interest. 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.

I worked as a software developer for many years, and later moved into management. I wrote less code and more documents. Strategy papers, performance reviews, change emails, promotion documents, proposals for new projects and features. Mieses sat on the website, the website sat on a server, and neither of us got much attention.

At one point I needed to modernize the site, of all things. I was migrating from old servers, 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 documents of the Mieses family history, it contains letters Jacques wrote in the last years of his life, from London, to relatives who had emigrated to Buenos Aires. So I started reading them and what I found touched me.

There are two from late February 1947, when he has just turned 82 and is writing from a rented room in Hampstead, London. 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.

In those letters I found the other, the more personal, side of the well-known chess grandmaster. He wrote from one small room after another in Hampstead, played in tournaments at 83, 84, 85, and won beauty prizes against players half a century younger. Under postwar rationing in London, he received food parcels from Buenos Aires and worried that the senders were being too generous. He missed his old hometown, Leipzig. He maintained, into his ninth decade, what reads like a one-man correspondence network across continents.

His family had been mostly destroyed. Some murdered in the Holocaust, others scattered to Stockholm, Cairo, Cheltenham, Buenos Aires.

Returning to the material with adult eyes, I noticed that no proper biography of Jacques Mieses existed in any language. There are passing mentions of Mieses in chess histories and I found a fine essay by Michael Negele in the German chess magazine Karl from 2012. This is not unusual for second-tier historical figures, but Mieses is also a small case study of the Jewish presence in early professional chess, and how that world ended. There is a gap in the historiography of Jewish chess and exile.

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.

Update, September 2026: the self-publishing plan described above is history. The book will be published by Hentrich & Hentrich in spring 2027. The details are in this new blog post: https://www.jgeppert.com/2026/09/10/jacques-mieses-biography-has-a-publisher/

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. Over the last few years I have learned a lot about writing and reviewing text. The tech writing skills do not transfer perfectly. A book is just not the same. But I am writing, and I’m learning in the process.

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 all the surrounding things: 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.

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. The site contains a lot of research material, several stories and anecdotes, a page about the book and a newsletter you can sign up for.

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.

For now, thanks for reading and following this topic.