By Suzanne Pekow
Though he has faced many conflicts in his life, the game of chess is the only one that still makes George Frohlinde’s heart race.
As a 7-year-old in a little town in pre-World War II Germany, Frohlinde wasn’t allowed to play outdoors with other boys owing to severe asthma. So his father introduced him to chess.
“It occupied the mind,” Frohlinde says. “It was a mental activity which I could do without getting short of breath.”
And now, at 79, Frohlinde still plays nearly every day at the Village Chess Shop, which he opened with his wife in 1972 in New York’s Greenwich Village. Though he sold the shop in 2003 to his nephew, Frohlinde is a regular fixture among the diverse group of masterminds and rabble rousers at the old shop on Thompson Street.
On any given day the place is abuzz with activity. Baskets of chess pieces and well-loved chessboards are evenly spaced on 14 formica-topped tables – two rows of them -- that dominate the inside of the shop. Players of all ages and walks of life sit and stand, playing and watching, alternately yelling and concentrating like mad as they face one another in passionate games. Many play “Blitz,” the timed game enjoyed by hustlers in nearby Washington Square Park, where competitors race against a stop-clock that they slap after every move. Others here play conventional chess, without a timer.
The shop’s only rules are written in chalk on a blackboard on the wall farthest from the door:
Be kind
$1.00 per hour
$3.00 to watch (this one is never enforced);
No taking back moves
$3.00 per profanity
Above the constant click-clack of the chess pieces, Frohlinde’s gravelly voice is sometimes difficult to understand. He has a friendly, yellow-toothed smile, thick square glasses, and a soft German accent. But his most distinguishing feature is the shoulder-length fine gray hair he wears loose beneath a stocking cap. He hasn’t had a haircut since his wife, Ruth Nash, died in 2000.
She was a German Jew who fled to New York in 1939 with her family just three weeks before the start of World War II.
“She was the spirit of the shop,” he says. “She was not interested in the game, she was interested in the people.” When they opened it in 1972 there were no employees. He would sell the chess sets -- which he ordered from suppliers on credit and eventually paid off -- and she would engage the customers, who came to play at 15 cents an hour. Frohlinde recalls taking only one day off the entire first year, but according to longtime regulars it was Nash who really ran the show.
“She was the strong one … and a pillar in his life,” says an 85-year-old Village Chess Shop fixture who identifies himself only as “The Doctor.” No one at the shop, not even Frohlinde, knows the Doctor’s real name, and no one really cares. The Doctor, a Hungarian Jew by birth, felt a kinship with Ruth Nash. To him, she represented the kind of Old World gentility that he does not believe Americans understand.
It is somewhat unusual that she fell for Frohlinde, considering his upbringing, a non-Jew in Nazi Germany. For a long time after World War II many Jews resented Germans. Some still do.
“To all those who lost their loved ones, anything German was taboo,” says the Doctor.
In truth, not a day goes by that Frohlinde doesn’t think about the war. In high school he was forced to be a member of the Hitler Youth and came close to being recruited by the SS. Though he claims to have resisted indoctrination into the Nazi ideology, he says that like most Germans at the time he essentially turned a blind eye to the murderous regime. And this still haunts him.
“It never leaves you. It’s your life, you know?”
He has written several plays, mostly in German, mostly for his own catharsis. In 1994 he wrote a play called The Third Testament which hasn’t yet been performed or published, but Frohlinde doesn’t seem to mind. It’s a minimalist drama about former German soldiers trying to reconcile their participation in the war. In many ways, Frohlinde says, The Third Testament is his way of dealing with his own feelings of guilt about the horrors of his country’s past.
“This guilt will choke us all,” says Null, a character in the play. “I saw the ruins. Now walls are rebuilt and our souls lie broken under the stones, freezing and wild.” Null is the figure with whom Frohlinde most closely identifies — a man who can’t seem to forgive himself for his father’s crimes. Frohlinde’s own father ran an airplane factory in Wismar, a city on Germany’s Baltic coast, during the war. Because of his high-profile position, Frohlinde’s father was a member of the Nazi party – but according to his son, did not really subscribe to the party’s beliefs.
“When the war broke out, my father said: ‘This is the end of Germany.’ So he knew it, but he went along.” At war’s end, Frohlinde made sure he and his father left when the Russians came. Wismar was on the border between what would become East and West Germany, and Frohlinde was afraid the Russians would arrest his father. Father and son sought refuge in nearby Hamburg, where Frohlinde worked as a cabinet maker and studied social work at Hamburg University.
The end of the war was not the end of conflict in Frohlinde’s life. At the university, he says, his fellow students treated him like an outcast because he had not participated in the war. He caught wind of several rumors circulating among his classmates. Behind his back they called him a Communist, a homosexual, even a Jew — none of which was true.
“I was always thinking independently,” he says. “Everyone was always in the rat race, and I always protested against things which I thought were not right. And the Germans don’t trust the independent thinker.”
When he came to New York in the mid-1950s to visit a friend, Frohlinde was ecstatic to find a place where original thinking was celebrated.
“The first day I arrived in New York,” Frohlinde says, “I said to myself: ‘I always imagined a city like this. I never knew it existed. Here I’ll stay.’”
