In Memoriam: Edgar Rosenberg 1925–2015

The death of Edgar Rosenberg on 19 December 2015 at his home in Ithaca, New York brings to a close an extraordinary life of one of a diminishing circle of Holocaust survivors who escaped Europe on the verge of World War II to begin the world again in the United States. Born in Fürth, northern Bavaria, Edgar left his hometown with his mother and younger brother en route to New York via Port-au-Prince, Haiti in June 1939. When he arrived Edgar was 14 and without a word of English, an obstacle he swiftly overcame. Within two years, he enrolled at George Washington High School in New York City to follow a familiar pattern after graduation and compulsory service in the U. S. Army. Eligible for support under the provisions of the G. I. Bill of 1944, he was admitted to Stanford University in 1951, where he quickly established himself as an outstanding student and the author of numerous short stories, translations and critical pieces.

Those of us who have known Edgar are familiar with the highlights of the academic career that followed. After completing his PhD at Stanford in 1958, he took his first major appointment at Harvard, where for eight years he taught courses in the history of the novel and in creative writing. In 1965, Edgar moved as a tenured Associate Professor to Cornell, his academic home until his eventual retirement in 2002 as an Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In the words of Roger Gilbert, the current chair of English, “Edgar Rosenberg was the wittiest, most erudite and gracious colleague I’ve known at Cornell. He was enormously beloved by students and faculty and by friends and colleagues all over the world. He could always be counted on to lighten the mood at a meeting with a well-chosen quip or pun.”

Among Dickensians, Edgar’s reputation is firmly cemented by two incomparable publications: From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English (1960) and his Norton edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1999). To each, Rosenberg brings a huge range of scholarship, illuminating in the first the “massive durability” of Jewish stereotypes over several centuries of literature and furnishing in the second an authoritative text of the novel combined with meticulous research and witty, informative commentary on the vexed question of the novel’s variant endings.

The humor and erudition informing Edgar’s scholarship permeated his everyday and personal communications. A single example will suffice, all the more telling since as an email it retains his epistolary quirks and oddities, so easily lost or discarded in that useful but bland electronic medium. “A letter from Barbara and Edgar usually heralds their imminent presence in London,” this one begins. “Well yes, we’re about to descend on this other-Eden-demi-Paradise on Sunday, plan to hang on for four weeks from 25 August to 22 September, and may be found in the same cellarage we occupied last year just off Sloane Square. It would, of course, be super if you could find a potent excuse to come up (or down) to London in the course of the next weeks. Did it really take me 88 years to indite a letter in fewer than 7 lines?” he concludes.

In the spring of 1965 Edgar offered a much anticipated graduate seminar on Dickens at Harvard. To be admitted, one had to be interviewed and students were accepted on the basis of their commitment to a single novel. Among several who went on to distinguish themselves, Jerry Meckier got in because he said he would do Little Dorrit. Looking back on that memorable seminar – one novel a week for fourteen weeks – Jerry likes to joke that some Dickensians began their careers waiting for the publication of Edgar’s Norton edition of Great Expectations only to contemplate the prospect of retirement before its appearance in 1999.

A clue to that delay appears in the second volume of Dickens Studies Annual published in 1972. In “A Preface to Great Expectations: The Pale Usher Dusts His Lexicons,” Edgar airs “some of the problems which nowadays confront...