Sonja Graf

Sonja Graf
Sonja Graf (left) plays at the Utrecht Chess Club against the local champion, October 3, 1936
Full name	Susanna Graf
Country	Germany
Born	(1908-12-16)December 16, 1908 Munich, Germany
Died	March 6, 1965(1965-03-06) (aged 56) New York City, United States

Susanna (Sonja) Graf (December 16, 1908 – March 6, 1965) was a German chess master who also lived in Argentina and the United States. She was women's world vice-champion, two-time U.S. women's champion and author of two books which describe her life in chess as well as the sufferings of her abusive childhood.

Born in Munich, Susanna Graf was the daughter of Josef Graf and Susanna Zimmermann, both Volga Germans from the Samara region, who had moved to Munich in September 1906. Her father was originally a priest in Russia, but moved to Munich to pursue life as a painter. She later wrote that despite the suffering she endured at the hands of her father, she was grateful that he taught her the game of chess when she was still a child.

Chess became her means of escape, both mentally and physically, and she began spending all her time in Munich chess cafés. Her fame as a coffeehouse player grew and she was introduced to and became the protégée of the German master, Siegbert Tarrasch. By age twenty-three, she had beaten Rudolf Spielmann twice in simultaneous competition and turned chess professional. She began traveling throughout Europe, following the chess circuit both for the experience and to distance herself from what she considered the ominous Nazi movement based, at the time, in Munich.

During the early decades of the 20th century, female chess players were a rarity and Sonja Graf basked in the popularity and attention her sudden fame brought her as much as she exploited the freedom and independence of her new itinerant lifestyle. In 1934, she played against the era's other woman champion, Vera Menchik, in an unofficial Amsterdam match and, subsequently, in an official 1937 world championship match in Semmering, Austria. She lost both matches (1:3 and 4.5 : 11.5), but was invited, along with Menchik, to participate in what would normally have been an exclusive male tournament held that year in Prague. Again, she did not win against any of the champions, and her best result was a draw with the Estonian master Paul Keres.