Immigrant of the Day: Jacqueline Rebecca Louise de Rothschild (France)

Jacqueline Rebecca Louise de Rothschild (born 1911 in Paris, France) is a chess and tennis champion, author, sculptor and a member of the Rothschild banking family of France. According to her memoir Jump in the Waves, her family had to flee France due to in the Nazi occupation during World War II.

Jacqueline de Rothschild and her husband settled in New York i n 1940. They lived in Philadelphia for several years before moving to Los Angeles in 1949.

As an American citizen, Jacqueline Piatigorsky, a name that she took upon marriage, won numerous national tennis championships.  Her passion for the game of chess led to a second career during which she represented the United States in the first woman’s Chess Olympiad and won a bronze medal. In the 1960s, she was the highest USCF-rated female chess player in California and ranked No. 2 in the United States.

Piatigorsky is a patron of the arts and in 1985 created an endowment for the New England Conservatory of Music to provide the “New England Conservatory/Piatigorsky Artist Award.” In her forties, she developed an interest in sculpting. A Los Angeles area gallery put on the first exhibition of her works in 1976.

Widowed at the age of sixty-five, she has continued working and playing tennis into her nineties.

KJ