ALEXANDER SCHENKER

SCHENKER-- Alexander Marian. A professor emeritus of Slavic Linguistics at Yale University, died on August 21 in Branford, CT. He was 94. Prof. Schenker was born in Krakow, Poland on December 20, 1924. When World War II broke out, his family fled but he and his mother were eventually arrested by Soviet police and sent to a Russian labor camp. After being freed in 1941, Alexander and his mother spent the remainder of the war in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The family was interviewed multiple times about their experiences during WWII and were among the families featured in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibit, Flight and Rescue. Once the war ended, Alexander and his mother sailed to the U.S. where they were reunited with other family members who successfully escaped at the beginning of the war. In 1948, Alexander matriculated into the Ph.D. program at Yale's Department of Linguistics and after receiving his doctorate, was hired first as a teacher of Russian and then as a professor in the Slavic Department from which he retired in 1996. In his years at Yale, Prof. Schenker was the only tenured professor without a high school diploma or bachelor's degree. Prof. Schenker's books include "Beginning Polish," "Fifteen Modern Polish Short Stories," "Spoken Polish," "The Dawn of Slavic," and "The Bronze Horseman." Over the course of his career, he was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Learning and in 2013 was awarded the Cross of Valor of the Highest Degree from the Polish government for his service to Polish culture. He was instrumental in bringing the Czeslaw Milosz Papers to Beineke Library at Yale. Prof. Schenker is survived by his wife of 49 years, Christina Schenker, their daughter Catherine Schenker, his two sons, Alfred Schenker and Michael Schenker from his previous marriage, and four grandchildren.