The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N A23

Robert M. Laughlin, an anthro-
pologist and linguist whose exten-
sive work in the state of Chiapas in
southern Mexico documented and
helped revitalize Mayan lan-
guages and culture, died on May
28 in Alexandria, Va. He was 85.
His son, Reese, said the cause
was the new coronavirus.
Dr. Laughlin spent much of his
professional life doing fieldwork
in Chiapas, beginning in the late
1950s. He learned the Tzotzil (also
spelled Tsotsil) language as a
graduate student with the Har-
vard Chiapas Project, a long-term
ethnographic field study that had
just been started by Professor
Evon Vogt and was focusing on
the town of Zinacantán. After
years of painstaking work, in 1975
Dr. Laughlin published The Great
Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo
Zinacantán, with 30,000 entries.
Indigenous languages in the re-
gion — there are many — had
been under siege since the Span-
ish conquest, and Dr. Laughlin’s
dictionary helped spur a revival of
interest in them. The dictionary,
published by the Smithsonian In-
stitution in Washington, where Dr.
Laughlin was curator of Meso-
american ethnology, was not sim-
ply a compilation of which Tzotzil
word equals which English word.
It was a deep dive into word ori-
gins, how the language had mutat-
ed and more.
“The term ‘dictionary’ hardly
does the work justice,” Judith Ais-
sen, professor emerita of linguis-
tics at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, said in an email. “It is
a rigorous work of linguistic schol-
arship, but through its entries,
also the repository of a great deal
of cultural knowledge.”
The dictionary, created with
two local collaborators, Romin
Teratol and Anselmo Peres, set an
example for the field. “It has been
the cornerstone of so many efforts
in language and knowledge revi-
talization ever since,” Igor Krup-
nik, chair of the anthropology de-
partment at the Smithsonian’s Na-
tional Museum of Natural History,
said by email.
But it was only the beginning
for Dr. Laughlin. He wrote or col-
laborated on various collections of
folk tales and dreams, an 18th-
century Tzotzil dictionary (with
John B. Haviland, an anthropolo-
gy professor at the University of
California, San Diego), and more.
And in 1982, when some Indige-
nous friends asked him for help in
creating a cultural association, he
became one of the founders of Sna
Jtz’ibajom — or, in English, the
House of the Writer, a collective
that promoted local writings and
publications.
An offshoot of that, a few years
later, was Monkey Business The-
ater, a troupe that performed folk
tales and other works. He brought
in the American puppeteer Amy
Trompetter to help local partici-
pants use puppets in their story-
telling.

“To her distress, the first skit they chose to perform was a folk tale that tells of a newlywed whose wife’s head mysteriously disappears at night to eat corpses,” he wrote in “Monkey Business Theater,” a 2008 book about the troupe. But the group caught on and was soon in high de- mand, performing throughout the region and beyond. One of Dr. Laughlin’s most re- cent collaborations was “Mayan Tales From Chiapas, Mexico” (2014), in which he and two trans- lators recorded 42 folk tales as told by the same woman, Fran- cisca Hernández Hernández, the only Tzotzil speaker remaining in her village. The book presented the stories in English, Spanish and Tzotzil. In the foreword, Gary H. Gossen, professor emeritus of anthropology and Latin American studies at the University at Al- bany, the State University of New York, wrote of Dr. Laughlin’s career: “He has earnestly and suc- cessfully returned to the native

Maya communities of highland Chiapas a sense of ownership of their own literary legacy.” Robert Moody Laughlin was born on May 29, 1934, in Prince- ton, N.J., to Ledlie and Roberta Howe Laughlin. His father was as- sistant dean of admissions at

Princeton University, and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in Princeton, gradu- ated from South Kent School in Connecticut in 1952 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English liter- ature at Princeton in 1956. The next year he enrolled in a summer graduate program in anthropology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, which included fieldwork

among the Mazatec, an Indige- nous people in the state of Oaxaca. His interest piqued, he enrolled at Harvard, where he received a master’s degree in anthropology in 1961 and a Ph.D. in it in 1963. In 1960 he married Miriam Elizabeth Wolfe, and after he joined the Smithsonian in 1965, they had al- ternated between living in Chia- pas and Alexandria, Va., for decades. Almost as challenging as com- piling his monumental 1975 dictionary was physically producing it, given the complexity of the material, the multiplicity of symbols and unusual letter combinations, and the limitations of the rela- tively primitive computers used to produce it. “When I went to pick it up,” Dr. Laughlin wrote in the introduc- tion, describing the first attempt to print a proof copy, “I discovered that the Tzotzil-English section was very much as I had desired. But the English to Tzotzil section of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary had been reduced to the lowest

common denominator; page after page of one letter per line ar- ranged in a single column. This was followed by all the Latin names neatly decapitated and ar- ranged alphabetically according to the second letter.” “My dictionary,” he added, “became known around the museum as The Great Tzotzil Disaster.” Modest efforts to resurrect In- digenous languages had been go- ing on for several decades when the dictionary appeared, but the Tzotzil language and its cousins were primarily oral traditions; speakers of such languages were illiterate in them. The dictionary helped change that. “A potential audience had slowly been building for material in Tzotzil, Tzeltal and about 30 other Mayan languages,” a 1992 article in Smithsonian magazine noted. “Laughlin’s dictionary con- tributed a standardized template for writing down the Mayan sounds.” Dr. Laughlin died in a hospital in Alexandria. In addition to his son,

he is survived by his wife; a daughter, Liana Laughlin; and three grandchildren. When Dr. Laughlin’s dictionary was published, Senator William Proxmire, the prominent Wiscon- sin Democrat, gave it one of his Golden Fleece Awards, which he used to call attention to projects he considered frivolous. Col- leagues said Dr. Laughlin had considered the award a badge of hon- or — “perhaps out of general con- trariness,” Thor R. Anderson, his friend and sometimes collabora- tor, wrote in an appreciation, “but also because, at the height of that particular contretemps, fellow scholars rushed to his defense.” In 1988, when Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Haviland published their co- lonial-era dictionary, “The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Do- mingo Zinacantán, With Gram- matical Analysis and Historical Commentary,” careful readers may have noted the dedication on Page 7: To William E. Proxmire For the fun of it!

Robert M. Laughlin, Preserver of a Mayan Language, Is Dead at 85

By NEIL GENZLINGER

JOHN B. HAVILAND

JOHN SWOPE/NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Robert M. Laughlin in 2005 in his office at the Smithsonian In- stitution. Top, in traditional garb, with Anselmo Peres, one of his Tzotzil collaborators during field work in Mexico’s Chiapas State, circa 1965; and, left, in 1981 at a traditional wedding in Chiapas.

JAMES DI LORETO/SMITHSONIAN

A seminal dictionary,

published in 1975 after

years of field work.

Sergei N. Khrushchev, a former
Soviet rocket scientist and the son
of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Sovi-
et leader during the Cold War of
the 1950s and ’60s, died on June 18
at his home in Cranston, R.I. He
was 84.
The Rhode Island medical ex-
aminer’s office said the cause was
a gunshot wound to the head, ac-
cording to The Associated Press.
The police said there were no
signs of foul play. His wife,
Valentina Golenko, had called the
police to report an emergency, and
he was pronounced dead at the
scene.
Mr. Khrushchev was a rocket
scientist before he moved to
Rhode Island in 1991, shortly after
the dissolution of the Soviet Un-
ion, to lecture on the Cold War at
Brown University in Providence.
He remained a senior fellow there.
He and his wife became natu-
ralized United States citizens in
1999 and held dual citizenships.
Mr. Khrushchev said in 2001 that
his becoming an American citizen
would not have displeased his fa-
ther, who, in 1956, in the depths of
the Cold War, famously declared
to Western officials, “We will bury
you!”
By the time his son became an
American citizen, the Cold War
was long over.
“I’m not a defector,” Sergei
Khrushchev told The Providence
Journal in 2001. “I’m not a traitor. I
did not commit any treason. I
work here and I like this country.”
Still, he said, he felt that becom-
ing an American citizen had given
him a new lease on life. “I’m feel-
ing like a newborn,” he told The
A.P. “It’s the beginning of a new
life.”
As a rocket engineer and com-
puter scientist in the Soviet Union,
Mr. Khrushchev played an active
role in developing guidance sys-
tems for missiles, including cruise
missiles launched from sub-
marines, from 1958 to 1968.
He then took up writing and lec-
turing. His areas of expertise in-
cluded Soviet economic and politi-

cal reforms, U.S.-Soviet relations from 1950 to 1964, and the history of the Soviet space program. He also helped his father write his four-volume memoir in Rus- sian and then translated it into English. Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to

1964 and chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier, from 1958 to 1964, when he was deposed and relegated to obscurity. He died in 1971 at 77. Americans had a close-up look at the Soviet leader and his family in 1959, when he visited the United States at the invitation of Presi- dent Dwight D. Eisenhower. Times were tense: The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space, launching Sputnik in 1957, and American schoolchildren practiced duck-and-cover drills as the threat of nuclear annihilation

hung over the planet. The premier brought his son, then 24, with him on the trip. “Americans who have observed and talked with him,” The New York Times observed of Sergei Khrushchev, “think he gives no sign of following in his father’s footsteps.” Sergei Khrushchev said years later, in the interview with The Providence Journal, that during that trip his family felt as if they had landed on Mars, seeing things they had never imagined. “It was palms, cars, highways, every- thing,” he said. He took home movies of it all, including Times Square. They were especially baffled by the concept of Disneyland, then four years old and already a top at- traction in Southern California. When told that his family would not be allowed to visit the park out of concerns for their safety, the premier exploded in anger: “What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place?” At his office at Brown, Sergei Khrushchev kept on his wall a framed cover of Life magazine with an enduring image from that historic, if somewhat carnival-like trip: his father visiting a farm in

Iowa and holding an ear of corn. Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev was born on July 2, 1935, in Mos- cow. His mother was Nina Petrov- na (Kukharchuk) Khrushcheva.

(His father had six children alto- gether, by two wives.) Sergei held several advanced engineering de- crees, including a doctorate from the Moscow Technical University.

In addition to his work with missiles, he worked on military and research spacecraft and moon ve- hicles. He was part of an exchange program at Brown University’s Cen- ter for Foreign Policy Develop- ment and later became a senior fellow at Brown’s Thomas J. Wat- son Institute for International Studies and a fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Gov- ernment. He also taught at the Na- val War College in Newport, R.I. In addition to his wife (he had an earlier marriage to Galina Mi- khailovna), his survivors include a son, Sergei, as well as a grand- daughter. Another son, Nikita, from a previous marriage, was a journalist who died of a stroke in 2007 at 47.

Sergei N. Khrushchev, 84, Rocket Scientist and the Son of a Former Soviet Premier

Sergei N. Khrushchev, above, was a young man when he visited an I.B.M. plant in the United States in 1959, accompanying his father, the Soviet leader, on a tour of America. In 2007, right, he spoke about the launch of Sputnik I at an exhibition in Chicago.

NAT FARBMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES M. SPENCER GREEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

A naturalized U.S.

citizen who wrote and

lectured extensively.

More obituaries appear on Page A26.

Gora, Jack Greenbaum, Sol

Lane, Sally Siegel, Shirley

GORA—Jack. The Hampton Synagogue mourns the passing of our cherished Benefactor and vi- sionary Founder. As a Holo- caust survivor, Jack was pas- sionate about building and growing Jewish life in the Hamptons. To his beloved wife Paula, to his children, Mona and David, and Bonnie and Tod, and to the entire family, our heartfelt sympathy. His memory will always be a source of blessing and in- spiration. Marc Schneier, Founding Rabbi Avraham Bronstein, Rabbi Carol Levin, President

GORA—Jack. UJA-Federation of New York mourns the passing of Jack Gora,belovedhusbandof Paula. His legacy will live on inhisfamily'sexemplary leadershipand generosity within the Jewish community. We extend our deepest condolencestoPaula,his daughters Mona Sterling (David) and Bonnie Greenfield (Todd), his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the entire family. Amy A. B. Bressman, President; David L. Moore, Chair of the Board; Eric S. Goldstein, CEO

GREENBAUM—Sol,

95, Mensch,extraordinary husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather. A CPA by profession, now he numbers among the stars. Private bur- ial, celebration of life at a later date. Donations in his ho- nor may be made to Springbrookny.org. Full obi- tuary at http://www.legacy.com/Link. asp?I=LS000196382858X. LANE—Sally Kuser, born December 15, 1924; died June 7, 2020. Widow of Arthur S. Lane, mother of seven. murphyfh.com/obituaries/ Sally-Lane/ SIEGEL—Shirley Adelson. With heartfelt sadness, the Trustees and Administration of Barnard College mourn the

passingofour esteemed alumna, Shirley Adelson Siegel '37. A recipient of Bar- nard's 2019 Medal of Distinc- tion at Radio City Music Hall where she was given a stand- ing ovation, Shirley was ack- nowledged for her “trailblaz- ing career as a brilliant civil rights lawyer, a pioneer in the fight for the rights of others and as one who never failed to pursue what is fair, to de- mand what is just.” Shirley Adelson Siegel was re- introduced to Barnard in “Un- deterred,” a 2018 Barnard Ma- gazine article which brought her new campus friends and devoted admirers. The entire Barnard community sends its condolences to her son, Eric, daughter Ann, and grandson, Samuel Fischer. She will be missed by all. Cheryl G. Milstein Chair, Board of Trustees Sian Leah Beilock President, Barnard College

MARONEY—Catherine T. January 7, 1926 - June 25, 2019. Belovedaunt,cousinand friend. Always in our hearts. SARACCO—Rudolph. Died June 25th, 2019. Gone from our lives. Fondly re- membered by Paul Burkhart and Carl Koivuniemi.

Deaths Deaths Deaths

In Memoriam

The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

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