Jacqueline Piatigorsky (1911–2012)

Jacqueline Piatigorsky, née de Rothschild, was born in Paris, a daughter of Baron Édouard Alphonse de Rothschild of the famous French banking family and his wife Germaine Alice Halphen. She was the sister of Guy de Rothschild and Bethsabée de Rothschild. She was raised at the vast Château de Ferrières and at a mansion at 2 rue Saint-Florentin in Paris that today is part of the USA Embassy. According to her 1988 memoir Jump in the Waves, her parents neglected her and left her upbringing to a nanny she felt was oppressive, and she grew up into a painfully shy and timid young woman. She learned to play chess as a child and it became a refuge for her. At age 19, she married publisher Robert Calmann-Lévy, a distant relative. They divorced after five years, and two years later she married renowned Russian-born cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, with whom she had two children. The family fled to the USA when Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II. They settled in Elizabethtown, New York, then lived in Philadelphia, before moving to Los Angeles, where her husband taught at the University of Southern California. In her new country, Jacqueline started playing chess by correspondence, and soon became a competitive player. She represented the USA in the inaugural Women's Chess Olympiad at Emmen, The Netherlands, in 1957, and her team won a bronze medal. She competed successfully in six U.S. Women's Championships in the 1950s and 1960s. She had an even greater influence on chess in America as a tournament organizer and philanthropist. She established the Piatigorsky Foundation to boost chess culture in the USA, and in 1963, staged the first Piatigorsky Cup tournament. As a patron of young players, she provided funds for travel to tournaments and established the U.S. Junior Invitational Championship. She also was a patron of the arts, and in 1985 created an endowment at the New England Conservatory of Music to support the Piatigorsky Artist Award. In her 40s, she developed an interest in sculpting, and first exhibited her work in 1976 at a Los Angeles-area gallery. She was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame posthumously in 2014.