Ellen Sydney Fine, a Rockville Centre native who became a respected scholar, educator and advocate for the humanities, died on Feb. 20. She was 86.
A graduate of South Side High School, Fine went on to a distinguished academic career as a professor of French at Kingsborough Community College, part of the City University of New York, where she influenced generations of students through her teaching and scholarship in French literature, Holocaust studies and poetry.
Born to Dr. Benjamin Fine and Lillian Fine of New York City, she was raised in a family deeply connected to education and journalism. Her father served as the Pulitzer Prize–winning education editor of The New York Times and gained national recognition for his reporting during the 1957 integration crisis at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, where he documented the confrontation surrounding student Elizabeth Eckford and helped shield her from a hostile crowd.
Her nephew, Jono Mainelli, remembered Fine as both deeply loving and intellectually demanding.
“She has a soul of a teacher, just like her grandmother and her grandfather,” he said. “It's kind of like having a loving teacher as an aunt.”
Fine began her academic journey at South Side, where classmates recalled an exceptionally bright and curious student. She later graduated from Smith College, remained an active alumna and earned a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate from New York University.
Her work often carried her between New York and Paris, where she kept an apartment in the historic Le Marais district and immersed herself in the literary culture she loved.
Summers often meant time with family in Rhode Island, where Fine spent time with her sister, Jill Fine Mainelli. There, Mainelli’s sons, Jono and Benjamin, spent childhood days with their aunt along the beach in the small village of Matunuck, where she sang French songs to them before retreating to a nearby cabin to write.
“I was five, six, seven years old,” Mainelli recalled. “She was locked at her desk working on her stuff and then in the morning, she'd be on the beach with me and my brother.”
Fine’s academic life placed her in conversation with some of the most influential writers and thinkers of her era. She shared conference stages with Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and moved within literary circles that included author James Baldwin.
Even late in life, Mainelli recalled bringing his aunt into Manhattan for plays, lectures and museum exhibitions, where her memories often surprised scholars who did not realize the quiet woman beside them had personally known many of the figures they studied.
“I'm going to miss how much knowledge she took with her that I will never know existed,” he said.
Beyond the classroom, Fine supported causes related to freedom, representation and cancer research, and established scholarships at Smith College and through the International Miami Book Fair in honor of her mother.
She was predeceased by her parents and her longtime partner, New York University professor Edward Robinson. She is survived by her sisters, nephews and extended members of the Fine and Mainelli families.
