How an escape from the Nazis colored the career of Harvard’s longest-serving dean

Now retired, Michael Shinagel reflects on his family’s flight from Vienna and how he, a boy who didn’t know English until age 7, earned a PhD in literature By Rich Tenorio CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Seventy-five years ago, a young Austrian-Jewish refugee fled Nazi-occupied Europe with his parents and older brother. That 7-year-old boy named Michael Shinagel…