“Chess will teach you when it is time to attack, when it is time to retreat and when it is better to simply wait.”
This is how Ossip Bernstein learned the game of life, on a chessboard. Indeed, on chessboards around the world, where every move opened up infinite possibilities, and where luck and weakness lurked behind every choice.
With The Right Move (Baldini+Castoldi), Enrico Franceschini takes us onto the great chessboard of history, through the revolutions and wars of the twentieth century, to tell us the extraordinary story of the great chess player Ossip Bernstein, a character who really existed. A biographical fiction steeped in suspense that intertwines history, life and imagination with twists and turns.
Ukrainian Jew, brilliant financial lawyer in Moscow and one of the strongest chess players in the world, Bernstein was a man who looked his greatest adversary, destiny, in the face, playing every game down to the last move. A man, with his strength and his breakability. Attracted by vice, by gaming in all its forms, by impossible challenges but with an indestructible faith in tradition, family and Jewish identity, which he reflects despite not being a believer.
The curtain opens in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1918. During the civil war between reds and whites, seven men stand before a firing squad. Shortly before opening fire, one of the Bolshevik officers recognizes a name among the condemned, that of the famous chess player. The officer proposes to the prisoner a game: if he loses, he will be shot; if he wins, demonstrating that he is the true champion of the chessboard, his life will be saved. The condemned man, Ossip Bernstein, a Ukrainian Jew dispossessed by the revolution, accepts. His victory marks the beginning of a memorable adventure that will take him, and will take us, from the fall of the Russian Empire to the birth of the Soviet Union, from the Paris of the Roaring Twenties to the collapse of Wall Street, through the Second World War, the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel up to the Cold War, where another game will decide the fate of history.
The faces of the greatest protagonists of the last century follow one another, page after page, among writers, artists, intellectuals, men of power, in a journey into the past that can help us understand the complex dynamics of our contemporaneity.
And here the chessboard becomes a metaphor for existence, showing us how to make the right decision at the right time, rely on our experience and accept the consequences of our choices.
Between an opening, a castling and a checkmate, the hardships of life have not spared Ossip, just as the merciless game of chess, sooner or later, spares no player. However, Bernstein is animated by a deep faith in human beings, in the future, in democratic Europe. A great champion who teaches us not to fall prey to difficulties, to look forward, to test ourselves by accepting victory as much as defeat or a draw.
After all, as Roland Barthes writes in Fragments of a Love Discourse,“This is life: falling seven times and getting up eight times”.
And to each his own game.
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The right move by Enrico Franceschini, Baldini+Castoldi. The Wee Small Blog.
