Frederick Jelinek's Obituary

Prof. Frederick Jelinek, dr.h.c., Julian Sinclair Smith Professor at theWhiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and the director of JHU’s Center for Language Speech and Processing, died unexpectedly at his workplace on Sept. 14, 2010. Prof. Jelinek is survived by his wife Milena Jelinek, professor at Columbia University, son and daughter William and Hannah, three grandchildren and his sister Susan Abramowitz. Prof. Frederick (“Bedřich” in Czech) Jelinek was born Nov. 18, 1932 in the former Czechoslovakia; his father Vilém was a dentist in a small city of Kladno, near Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). The family was half Jewish; his mother was born to Czech parents in Switzerland. Thus, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, at the time of “Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren”, 1939-1945) they experienced very difficult times, as many Jews did at the time. In 1941, they even had to leave their home city andmove to Prague. His father, who had planned emigration in the early days of German rule but – tragically – decided to stay, was eventually deported to Theresin, a Jewish ghetto north of Prague. He died there because of a typhus epidemic in the last days of the World War II. Bedřich Jelinek then entered a Czech high school. He actually had trouble getting through, due to three missing years of formal education that was stripped from him, as frommany others, by various anti-JewNazi decrees. After 1948, when the Communists came to power following the well-known “February coup” in Czechoslovakia, his mother sagaciously decided to leave the country. One of the reasons was also that the revolutionary organization of Communist Youth would not allow her son to even take the high school graduation exam. Thanks to her Swiss origins, they were easily allowed into the United States and they settled in New York. Frederick Jelinek then started evening engineering courses at the City College of New York, despite being interested more in becoming a lawyer. However, as he also recalled in his acceptance speech of the honorary doctorate at the Charles University in Prague in 2001, he thought that his foreign accent wouldmake him a less successful lawyer and that also