Donald Kenrick 1929–2015

Photograph: David Altheer

Donald Kenrick was born to a family of Polish Jewish immigrants on 6th June, 1929 in Hackney and died in hospital in Isleworth on 12th November 2015. He had been ill for some time. He is survived by his daughter Timna, four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Wartime conditions allowed him to go to the Perse School in Cambridge, where, under the influence of his Latin teacher, he became a supporter of the Common Wealth party, and when that collapsed after 1945, the Young Communist League. He left school in 1947, having gained a place at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies and went off to the then compulsory military service with the British Army in Egypt. In 1948 the Attlee government decreed that all communists should be dismissed from the army. Corporal Kenrick immediately presented himself to his commanding officer, and reported himself as a card-carrying communist. The officer told him that his work in the British Forces broadcasting Services was just too important, and since Kenrick had already fallen in love with the Arabic language (as he was also later to fall in love with the Berber language teaching in Morocco in the early 1950s), he stayed on. When he went on to SOAS in 1949, the majors for his first-class Linguistics degree were Arabic and Hebrew.

He arrived there a committed Stalinist, with the intention of systematising for the Anglophone world the linguistic theories of Soviet academician Y. N. Marr. When Stalin denounced Marr in a letter to Pravda in June 1950 (cited in Kolokowski 1978: 141), Kenrick was truly shocked. It was not that he disagreed with Stalin’s common-sense criticisms of Marr (who could?), but the realisation that what he had seen as revolutionary audacity was just intellectual fraud that could only have gained a hearing with the connivance of Stalin and the Communist Party. He quit the Communist Party, and turned in linguistic theory to the nascent Universal Grammar of Noam Chomsky.

The revelation of Russian anti-semitism also made him think again about his Jewish identity. Still an atheist, he taught his young Danish fiancée the necessary Hebrew prayers so that she could convert and they could be married in synagogue, and, after taking a PGCE, and teaching for a while, he embarked on his MA thesis, ‘The Image of the Jew in Scandinavian Fiction and Drama’, which he did not manage to finish until 1965, as University College London insisted he attain degree-level competence in Norwegian Danish, Swedish and Yiddish first. By then he had already started the work for his PhD.

He first took part in cultural exchanges with Bulgaria while he was Head of Languages at Pitman’s College. As his marriage to Bente had collapsed, he fell in love with a Bulgarian folk dancer, and took a teaching job in Bulgaria so that he could be with her. Alas, by the time he took up his post, she had married someone else. He joined the Bulgarian Communist party, and later told me that the self-criticism sessions of the communist teachers’ cell in the school where he was working were one of the most helpful experiences of his life.

It was at this time he made Roma friends, and learned the Romani language from them. Falling in love with it, as he had fallen in love with Arabic, and Danish and Gaelic and Cornish before, he joined the Gypsy Lore Society, and its secretary–editor, Dora Yates, put him in touch with the doyen of Bulgarian Romani Studies in the west, Bernard Giliatt-Smith. He published his first academic paper in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1967 and joined its editorial board. He successfully defended his PhD thesis, ‘Morphology and lexicon of the Romani dialect of Kotel’ at SOAS in 1969. This was, essentially, a Chomskyan generative grammar of Drindari Romani, and appealed greatly to his examiners. He never published it, however, because by this time he had lost faith in Chomskyan Universal Grammar, just as he...