Liliane Massarano Greene

GREENE, LILIANE MASSARANO Liliane Massarano Greene died on December 24, 2010 at the Whitney Center in Hamden, Connecticut. Born on October 10, 1928, in Salonika, Greece, the only child of Maurice and Daisy (Kohn) Massarano, she grew up in Paris, France until political events forced her family to flee; they eventually arrived in New York in February, 1941. Her life-long passion for learning and especially for reading literature manifested early. She graduated from Hunter College with a BA in History in 1948, followed a year later by an MA from Columbia University in English Literature. She was one of the inaugural recipients of the Fullbright Fellowship which took her back to her beloved France for a year of post-graduate study. While there, she met and married the late Thomas McLernon Greene. Liliane arrived in New Haven with her husband in 1952 where they made a rich and long life together in the diverse community of scholars at Yale University and where they raised their three sons: Philip (New Haven, CT), Christopher (Madison, CT), and Francis (Highland Park, IL). As her children came of age, Liliane returned to her love of literature, earning her Ph.D. from Yale in French Literature in 1969. With occasional interruptions, she was on the staff or faculty of the French Departments of Connecticut College and Yale University throughout much of the decades of her mid-life. She retired from her final appointment as the Managing Editor of Yale French Studies in 1994. She was a founding member of the Center For Independent Study (1978), and continued her association with that organization to the very end of her life. In spite of her famous aversion to written correspondence, Liliane was a remarkable friend to many over the span of her life; she had an uncanny capacity to put people at their ease and to convey how much she cherished them. Accordingly she was blessed with great and loving friends who were legion. In addition to her sons, she is survived by her beloved grandchildren Michael Moroney, and Jennifer, Benjamin, Abigail, Anne, Peter, and Charlotte Greene. Above all she treasured her books, her family, her many long-enduring friendships, reading (and re-reading) across many genres...and Paris in all lights and all seasons. Liliane will be buried at a private interment at the Grove Street Cemetery. There will be a Memorial Service for friends and family in the early part of 2011. Contact Hawley Lincoln Memorial for further details. Her friends and family will immediately recognize that Liliane, typically, would have been as embarrassed as she would have been delighted at the thought of memorial contributions made in her honor. For those who are of a mind to do so, however, she would have been happy to have contributions be made to the Yale University Department of French (Graduate Fellowships).