Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa

Biographical Information

Yakov Malkiel was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Kiev in 1914, but civil war in Russia forced the family to move to Berlin. By the time he was of college age, Germany was becoming an increasingly difficult place for Jews. He had to overcome serious difficulties before he was admitted into Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität, where in 1938 he received his Ph.D. magna cum laude, specializing in romance linguistics. The worsening situation for Jews in Germ,any made his safety tenuous, and he left soon after receiving his degree. After emigrating with his parents to the United States in 1940, he worked briefly in Wyoming and then joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1942, first as lecturer, then as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and eventually as Professor of Romance Philology. He participated in the 1952 founding of the Department of Linguistics, and in 1965 he became a member of the department, where he taught until his retirement.

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