Alfred David, 84, passed away Friday at his home in Portland, Oregon, where he had lived since 2008. He was born March 31, 1929, in Hamburg, Germany, which he left in 1938, thereby escaping the Holocaust. His family settled in Houston, Texas, where he learned English, and he went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at Harvard University. He had a long and distinguished career as a beloved teacher and a scholar of Chaucer and medieval English literature generally in the Indiana University Department of English, from which he retired in 1994. Among his other distinctions, he was a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Research Fellowships, and he was a past president of the New Chaucer Society, the international society of Chaucer scholars. His name was known to many even outside his field of scholarship for his editorship of the medieval section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and for his role as advisor to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate, in the production of his prize-winning translation of Beowulf. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and his son and daughter-in-law, Benjamin and Margot, of Portland.
Alfred David, 84, passed away Friday at his home in Portland, Oregon, where he had lived since 2008. He was born March 31, 1929, in Hamburg, Germany, which he left in 1938, thereby escaping the Holocaust. His family settled in Houston, Texas, where he learned English, and he went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at Harvard University. He had a long and distinguished career as a beloved teacher and a scholar of Chaucer and medieval English literature generally in the Indiana University Department of English, from which he retired in 1994. Among his other distinctions, he was a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Research Fellowships, and he was a past president of the New Chaucer Society, the international society of Chaucer scholars. His name was known to many even outside his field of scholarship for his editorship of the medieval section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and for his role as advisor to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate, in the production of his prize-winning translation of Beowulf. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and his son and daughter-in-law, Benjamin and Margot, of Portland.
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