In Memoriam

Max Pollack

Max Pollack, a professor in the Psychology Department from 1966 until his retirement in 1990, died in Manhattan in early February. Max received his PhD in clinical psychology from NYU and held research positions in the Division of Pediatric Psychiatry of the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, the Office of Consult on Services for the Aged in Queens, and at Hillside Hospital in Jamaica before his arrival at Queens College as an associate professor.

Max received early National Institutes of Health funding for his research in biological psychopathology, and reminiscent of the time, was asked to abrogate his grant to devote more time to teaching. His research appeared in such well-respected journals as the American Journal of Psychiatry, Brain, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Max received tenure in 1967, and was promoted to full professor in 1969. He was very active in teaching psychopathology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the department, and served on a number of second doctoral examinations and doctoral dissertation committees. He is survived by his wife, the novelist Linda Wolfe, and his children. Jeffrey Halperin

Seymour Resnick

Seymour Resnick, a beloved colleague and a former chair of the onetime Department of Romance Languages, passed away on January 14, just one day short of his 87th birthday. Seymour joined Queens College full time in 1964 and retired in 1990, after a highly productive career as a professor and as a master teacher who was, without a doubt, single-handedly responsible for the development and prominence of our foreign language teacher-preparation programs. He himself had been a foreign language teacher in the New York and Long Island systems before coming to the college, which helps to explain the high degree of success of the programs he supervised. He knew from experience what was required of our teachers in the field, and he prepared them fully in skill as well as content areas.

Seymour was a man who loved languages and literature. Although his doctorate from NYU was in Spanish literature—“The Jew as Portrayed in Early Spanish Literature (to the End of the 15th Century)”—his passion for languages led him to study French, German, Italian, Catalan, and others, so that he was a highly skilled translator and a truly fluent multilinguist. We remember fondly his skill at humor within and across languages, which isn’t easy for a non-heritage speaker. Proof of his language skills is evident in the significant number of publications and books he authored that were devoted to the literatures and languages he so loved.

Seymour brought his passion for languages and for teaching to his department and to his students, and it will be missed; but more than that, we will miss his warmth and his genuine caring for people. Emilio De Torre