Getting to know Yale leaders—Margit Kaye, 55 years at Yale

The year before Margit joined Yale, she emigrated from Germany. She had a sponsor in Florida, but when that did not work out, she went to stay with a friend in New York City. Margit and her friend traveled to New Jersey for a visit one weekend and Margit met her now late husband. They were married a year later and moved to New Haven where he knew librarians at Sterling Memorial Library. Her German language skills came in handy, and she was hired to work with German serials.

Margit had wanted to move to an English-speaking country ever since she was a child in a POW camp after World War II when she heard British soldiers speaking. America had always promised a more lucrative life. When a job opened up in the map collection in Sterling, she was encouraged to apply and was hired, learning under curator Alexander Vietor, who became her mentor. Since that day, Margit has worked in the Yale Map Collection, which moved to the Beinecke five years ago.

In the ensuing years, Margit became an expert on Yale’s antiquarian map collection and one former colleague noted that her “almost superhuman knowledge” came naturally from loving something so completely for so long. Margit has said herself that the maps became like “my own babies.”

While she was learning everything about the map collection, she was also working toward her undergraduate degree in behavioral science and then her master’s in library science. She credits Yale with making this education possible and says, “I’m forever grateful for that. It stays with you for your whole life.”

Margit’s expertise was critical during a time described by a former Yale librarian as “the greatest affront to dedicated stewards of antique maps in many of the greatest libraries and archives around the world”—the theft of priceless maps. The most notorious perpetrator was E. Forbes Smiley, once considered a respectable antiquarian map dealer and someone that Margit knew well and had early suspicions about.

The book The Map Thief tells the story and features her on 11 of its pages. It was Margit’s deep institutional knowledge that helped Yale recover many of its stolen maps as she was able to produce documented evidence from her tracking of websites, use of little-known boxed catalogs, microfiche of an earlier inventory, and the start of digitization of portions of the collection.  “When I began to get suspicious of Smiley,” Margit recalls, “I would look at his dealer catalogue and know that some of his maps were actually ours.”

Through it all Margit has prided herself on producing excellent work for the patrons of the Yale Map Collection, students, faculty, and researchers. Many of her best memories are of the students with whom she interacted and often became friends.

“I have the highest praise for Yale,” Margit says, “for giving me a wonderful, wonderful life experience.”

Learn more about the 2020-2021 Yale honorees including Constance Clement, celebrating 50 years at the Yale Center for British Art, with the Long-Service Recognition yearbook and video.