Mona May Karff

Who was Mona May Karff?

Mona May Karff was an American competitive chess player. Karff dominated U.S. women's chess in the 1940s and early 1950s and had an extended career. She held seven U.S. Women's Chess Champion titles and four consecutive U.S. Open titles.

She was born Mona May Ratner in Bessarabia, a province in Tsarist Russia. Sometime after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, her family moved to Tel-Aviv, in what was then Palestine. Her father, Aviv Ratner, a wealthy Jewish land-owner, had taught her to play chess when she was 9 years old. Because of her natural ability, she started playing in tournaments in Tel-Aviv and developed into a strong player.

In the 1930s, she moved to Boston. There she met and married her cousin, an attorney named Abraham S. Karff. The marriage was brief and, though she never remarried, her long-time romantic relationship with Edward Lasker was never a secret.

She played in three Women's World Chess Championships: 1937 Stockholm, playing for Palestine and placing sixth; 1939 Buenos Aires, playing for the U.S. and placing 5th; 1949 Moscow, playing for the U.S.. When FIDE established titles in 1950, Mona May Karff was one of four American women to receive the title of Woman International Master.