When Jews rooted for an anti-Semite

Lara Vapnyar's story Fischer vs Spassky in current New Yorker is a great account of a strange and vanished time and place - the era when the Soviet Union seemed unassabilale, information was tightly controlled, East-West tensions were huge, Jews were an oppressed minority (maybe that's not so vanished), and at least in some quarters chess champs were international celebrities. This could only be in Russia in the 1970s or so - her story focuses on an older Russian immigrant in America, working as a home health-care aide, tending a man who's dying of cancer, and on the one particular day of the story she hears a news report of the death of Bobbie Fischer, which prompts her to recall her view of the Fischer-Spassky match when she was a child in the USSR: her parents, and many Jews, were apparently huge fans of Fischer, which was all a component of their hatred of the Soviet Union - her parents were talking about emigrating and weighing the risks of even applying to do so - in many cases, Soviets denied the applications and then made the families suffer so it was an all-or-nothing risk. Father decides they will apply if Fischer wins; mother, secretly, wants to stay - so the chess match becomes a symbol of the marital conflict, of East-West conflict, of Jew-other conflict. Vapnyar captures really well the feeling of living in a dacha during hot summer months, the difficulty of trying to get information about this distant chess match when they knew Pravda, its name to the contrary, would never print the truth. The story is tinged with sadness, as we learn that the father died shortly after emigrating, the mother remains underemployed - life in America isn't all they'd hoped, but it's an opportunity for their children and way out of an oppressive life. She mentions the Fischer to the old man from whom she's caring, and he only notes how Fischer was crazy and anti-Semitic. I guess the story is tinged with irony, also - the many Soviet Jews rooting for Fischer - did they think he was Jewish? did they know he was half-Jewish? - when in later years Fischer became (maybe always was?) a paranoid anti-Semitic monster: They should have rooted for Spassky, who apparently was a generous opponent and a gentleman. We are all products of our environment, to a degree - but not in predictable or easily delineated ways.