Yakov Malkiel

With the death of Yakov Malkiel on April 24, 1998 at age 83, an era in Romance philology came to an end.* Malkiel was one of the last survivors of that group of refugee scholars who, fleeing National Socialist Germany, came to the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s and helped change their chosen disciplines by skillfully combining their solid, tradition-based factual training received in the leading universities of Central Europe with the methodological and theoretical advances introduced by more experimentally inclined New World practitioners of general linguistics. Among the Romanists, most of the new arrivals were experts in literary and cultural history; in addition to Malkiel, the roster of Romance linguists included Henry and Renée Kahane, Georg Sachs (who died young), Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Pulgram, who at 88 remains active in the fields of Romance and Italian linguistics.¹

Malkiel was born in Kiev on July 22, 1914 into a prosperous Russian-Jewish merchant family with strong intellectual leanings. The vicissitudes of the Russian Civil War obliged the family to move to Berlin. Upon completing his nine-year course of study at the Werner-Siemens-Real Gymnasium in Berlin-Schöneberg, where he majored in Latin and French and submitted a thesis on the early twentieth-century French poet Paul Valéry, Malkiel entered the Friedrich-Wilhelms (now the Humboldt) University of Berlin at the very moment that the National Socialist regime was taking power. As the holder of a refugee passport, Malkiel was not immediately affected by the exclusion of German Jews from the universities. Although highly interested in literary studies, he chose to specialize in Romance linguistics under Ernst Gamillscheg, himself a student of the great Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke. He also studied Slavic and Semitic linguistics respectively with such renowned experts as Max Vasmer and Eugen Mittwoch.² Malkiel noted on several occasions that Gamillscheg scarcely paid him any attention during the preparation of his dissertation, but allowed for the possibility that his teacher might have had to exercise caution in dealing with a Jewish student. In 1938 Malkiel submitted his dissertation Das substantivierte Adjektiv im Französischen, a mere torso of the original project, and published it through the Jüdischer Buchhandlung Joseph Jastrow.³ Realizing that there was no future for him in Central Europe, Malkiel and his parents left Berlin in February 1940 and, by way of Rotterdam, eventually reached New York City.

In his ‘Autobiographic sketch: Early years in America’ (1980) Malkiel used the adjective ‘grim’ (84) to describe his two-year stay in New York where he could not find full-time scholarly employment. During this time he assiduously began to make contacts along the East Coast with American-trained Romance scholars and quickly learned that traditional European Romance philology was not in vogue among American structural linguists. Malkiel was obliged to learn the ways of linguistic research as practiced in the United States. From the outset the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) played a major role in Malkiel’s professional life and development. He became a member in 1940 and that year attended the Society’s annual meeting in Providence. In order to increase his scholarly profile Malkiel began to prepare articles in English for publication in such journals as Language (then edited by Bernard Bloch) and Romanic Review, while striving to support himself and his parents with various forms of part-time academic employment.

In January 1942 Malkiel received an invitation to teach languages as a replacement instructor at the University of Wyoming. During his six-month stay in Laramie, Malkiel taught Latin, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and (on a voluntary basis) Russian and found time to channel one study, ‘Some contrasts between Spanish and Portuguese pertaining to verbal derivation’ (1942), through a University of Wyoming monograph series. In June of that year Malkiel accepted an invitation from the noted Hispanist Sylvanus Griswold Morley to visit Berkeley. By good fortune, a vacancy in Spanish suddenly materialized through the resignation of a faculty member who joined the Royal Canadian Navy. Morley offered Malkiel a one-year lectureship, which turned into a regular appointment. Malkiel remained on the...