Yakov Neishtadt
(Israel)
Yakov Isayevich Neishtadt: Born in Moscow in 1923 and raised there, he became a living legend in Russian chess. He was already a first-category player at the beginning of World War II, but then he had to serve his country in battle. After the war he started to play in tournaments again and became a master of sports of the USSR as well as a world-class correspondence chess player and an arbiter.
But Neishtadt is best known as an outstanding chess journalist. He has written more than 20 opening books, which have been published n a dozen languages. From 1955 to 1973 he was secretary of the magazine Chess in the USSR, and from 1977 to 1979 an editor of the famous Soviet chess magazine 64.
In 1992 Neishtadt moved to Israel with his family. There he is still writing books. Genna Sosonko, in the article 'Yakov Neishtadt at 80' in his book Smart Chip from St Petersburg (New-in-Chess 2006), called him 'a living treasure-trove of history, anecdotes, incidents, events, memories of people, sketches.'