Professor Roiter died recently after a distinguished career in teaching, literature, research and Judaica. He was my instructor in English for the survey course in British literature (1660-1800, from Samuel Pepys and John Milton to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) when I was an undergrad at the Université de Montréal. He was also the author of articles and two books about the Holocaust including Voices from the Holocaust and Voice from the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan. This is no surprise as Roiter was born the day before Germany invaded Poland and was a war baby.
Roiter’s third book caught my interest when it was assigned in my Canadian Immigrant Fiction course. Here Comes Hymie! is a story about immigrant Jewish families in Montreal where the protagonist and title character bore a disturbing similarity to one of my own family members. I lent it to my mother to read as she grew up in the same era as Roiter, also in Montreal. Mother enjoyed reading Here Comes Hymie! and I was able to arrange for mother to sit in on one of Roiter’s classes. It was a big thrill for her as my mother never got a chance to finish school, much less attend university.
Professor Roiter was a nice man who always did his best and gave me sage counsel during a difficult time for me. He was the one who, in a private meeting in his office, first suggested I should move to Israel aged twenty-five to find a career and new life there. I hesitated for many years but returned to the thought also. If I had acted on Roiter’s advice, my life would have been completely changed one way or the other. It’s not always easy being a Zionist but Roiter was ardent and eloquent in his convictions. When Salman Rushdie’s life was threatened with a fatwa, Roiter told his class he had joined a solemn pledge by scholars around the world to read aloud a passage from Rushdie’s published works at the start of every class for the rest of his career should ever Rushdie be murdered by what V. S. Naipaul called “an extreme form of literary criticism”.
Roiter often regaled us with stories of McGill in the 1950s, New York in the 1960s, Paris in the 1940s, the fuzzy green suit he once wore to a job interview and kept hidden away ever since, his opinions about Quebec society and about the “cold hard realities” of literature. I’m grateful for the lessons he gave in life and literature and will remember him always.
Frederick Klein
July 31, 2024
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