Isaac Meyers, 28, Ph.D. Candidate in Classics at Harvard

Isaac Meyers, a Ph.D. candidate in classics at Harvard University, was killed Monday when hit by a grocery truck on a Cambridge, Mass., street corner. He was 28. No charges had been filed, and Cambridge police said the death was still being investigated.

Meyers grew up in Manhattan and attended St. Ann's School in Brooklyn before attending Yale. He also studied at Oxford University. At Harvard, he was a Ph.D. candidate in classics with a concentration in Hebrew. He taught Latin and had recently been translating Hebrew sacred texts into Greek, friends said.

He was also an amateur musician and, as "Professor Tam-Tam," played ukulele with a trio called the Rothschilds. Among the band's tracks: "We're Both Carriers," "Sarah Is a Lawyer," and "The Shidduch Date Went Bad."

Meyers was an active member of Harvard Hillel. A group of faculty and students from the classics department at Harvard gathered together Monday night, packing the department's lounge, to mourn his loss. A busload of his Boston acquaintances is slated to arrive from Boston this morning for his funeral at Ansche Chesed Synagogue at 251 W. 100th St.

His father, William Meyers, is a photography critic for The New York Sun.

Isaac Meyers was also interested in journalism, and at one point he interned at Azure, a quarterly journal of ideas published in Israel. He wrote poetry criticism for the Forward, often turning his attention to religious poems. "Orthodoxy and poetry tend to give each other the jitters," he wrote in a 2005 review. "If that seems to be overstating things, try praising a poet for being 'Orthodox' or even 'well behaved.' Then try asking a yeshiva bokhur to waste his time phrasing things beautifully. This detente is a shame, since traditional Judaism offers a rich background for poets, even in English — as long as the poets are willing to look slightly eccentric."

He is survived by his parents, William Meyers and Nahma Sandrow, and a sister, Hannah.