I had the privilege of knowing this amazing woman in 1980. Professor at U of C Irvine, Russian Studi
I was only 23 and is a long story. She and my uncle traded her son and me. We were both handfuls. I went to live with her and her son went to live with my uncle. Fun times in 1980 in Orange County, CA.......
I am remembering now all the stories she would tell me of her family's escape from Ukraine.
She taught me how to make borscht.
She changed my life.
I grieve for all of Ukraine, so much. My heart breaks..
Ms7wo7rees
Helen Harmash Weil, Russian Studies: Irvine
1933-1987
Lecturer, Program in Russian
Through her teaching, involvement in community outreach, and leadership, Helen Harmash Weil exemplified the highest ideals of faculty service and has served as an inspiration to her students at UCI. Her death on August 1, 1987 has deprived us of the presence of a teacher of great dedication.
Helen Harmash was born on February 2, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk in the Soviet Ukraine. Her mother, a biologist, and her father, an agricultural professional, fostered in her a love of poetry since her early childhood. (Since that time, she could recite poetry from memory after a few hearing.) The war interrupted her education. After spending one year in Poland, the Harmash family spent the period 1946-1949 in a Ukrainian holding camp in Augsburg, West Germany. After her arrival in the United States in 1949, Helen completed her high school education in Philadelphia, and then entered the Drexel Institute of Technology. She became a U.S. citizen in 1956. Two sons, Robert and Daniel, were born of her first marriage.
In the 1950s Helen Harmash was a piano recitalist for a time, while also studying chemistry. In the 1960s she studied Russian language and literature at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania, before taking a B.A., then an M.A. degree in Russian at San Diego State University, becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1972 she completed her Ph.D. coursework in the Department of Slavic Languages at UCLA. After teaching briefly at UCSD, Helen Weil was appointed at UCI in 1973. The following year she became Lecturer with Security of Employment in the Program in Russian at UCI.
For twenty years the classroom has been Helen Weil's teaching and testing ground, a place where her professional experience, and the richness of her understanding and knowledge of Russian language and culture has been imparted to her students. She demonstrated her commitment to student learning in the development of language instruction materials and in the organization of the UCI Russian Institute and Practicum. She created learning tools and an environment in which students might attain intellectual knowledge
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as well as experience personal achievement. Many students have chosen to study at UCI for these very experiences, and many have subsequently earned recognition, including President's Undergraduate Fellowships and Committee on Instructional Development Awards, for research conducted under her guidance. Many have also gone on to do graduate study.
Helen Weil brought attention to UCI through intercultural exchange. With or without cultural agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States, a significant number of Soviet as well as émigré novelists, poets, playwrights, actors, cinematographers, and musicians have visited UCI under the sponsorship of the Visiting Russian Writers Program organized by her. With the visit of Bulat Okudzhava and the Okudzhava Seminar in 1979, cultural exchange became an educational opportunity. The Symposium on Soviet Russian Literature and Society that Helen Weil organized in 1982 drew scholars from Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Southern California; Stanford University; Tulane University, and Yale University. In 1985 the visiting Soviet delegation endowed the Russian Institute with a sizable library collection which Helen Weil made public through the UCI library.
Helen Weil served as the director of the Program in Russian for eight years, during which time she steered her energies in the direction of curriculum enhancement, calling on the resources of UCI and other UC campuses to work cooperatively. However, it has not been only in publicly visible areas that she has worked to strengthen educational opportunities at Irvine. Student learning and achievement have been in the forefront of her University service activities. Helen Weil's committee work has dealt with instructional issues (Committee on Undergraduate Instruction, Policy Committee of the Language Laboratory) and with cultural enrichment (Committee for Arts and Lectures). At the campus and systemwide levels, as a member/chair of the Committee on Admissions and Relations with Schools, the student Affirmative Action Committee, and the Committee on Scholarships, Honors, and Financial Aid, her work has been directed toward extending equal educational opportunities as well as encouraging student achievement.
In the area of student affirmative action, Helen Weil played a leading part in the development of the February 24, 1984, Joint Senate Statement on Undergraduate Student Affirmative Action--a landmark resolution for the campus. The statement's proclamation of commitment to helping underrepresented minority students become academically prepared for enrollment and graduation at UC Irvine is significant. Of further importance is the commitment to transform UCI into a “multicultural institution in which students from underrepresented groups find an environment amenable to their education” and to encourage faculty to “integrate culturally diverse material into the curricula whenever feasible.” The efforts Helen Weil
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made to carry out the intent of this statement is a tribute to her deep concern about fostering the growth of the University of California, Irvine.
Helen Weil devoted special energy to the Russian Institute and Practicum, which she directed on the UCI campus every summer since 1973. While the Institute was in session, Helen brought together people and diverse elements and welded them together for the time of the Institute. Believing as she did in the power of literature, poetry, and music to illuminate the human condition, she drew on her background to make participants explore not only Russian, but Russian literature, culture, guitar poetry, and music.
Helen Weil insisted on personalizing language instruction for the individual by recognizing the individual. Students--whether faculty members at other institutions, justices, contractors, geologists, psychologists, film editors, college students, foreign students, junior high school pupils, grandmothers and grandsons (such was the varied array of participants)--were not permitted to remain strangers to each other. Each individual still worked toward roughly the same goal as other individuals: greater communication and understanding.
One participant in the Institute commented: “We were an assuredly ill-assorted group when we all first appeared on the doorsteps of the Institute: a superior court judge, part-time brigadier, pale poetesses and flute players, guys who had graduated in both Russian and Chinese from the U.S. Defense Language Institute, a Fulbright scholar and his family en route to Moscow, the gifted on scholarships, teen-age physicists, a twelve-year old prodigy, a j.g. from a nuclear sub. But for Helen this was a piece of cake. Not only could she individuate the material for each student without any academic conceit for format, but she also sparked esprit-de-corps by a daily participation in our struggles.”
Helen's two decades of teaching, outreach activities, and University service reveal an admirable record of her commitment to the University and to student welfare. She demonstrated that standards of commitment and achievement must be set by people of conviction and persistence in order for the University to thrive. Our students have profited from her example, and as they became alumni, her contributions to the University extended far beyond the walls of its classrooms.
Helen was extremely brave in facing her fatal ailment. She faced it with open eyes, with awareness that the outcome might be--or, after a while, was certain to be--fatal. In spite of that awareness, she maintained many avenues of contact with life during these past few years of her life: constant concern with the lives of her two sons, the joy she found in the presence of her granddaughter, a renewed dimension of meaningful dialogue with her parents, much good and deepened dialogue with several of us, concern for different campus matters, and continued work on the Russian Summer Institute.
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The memorial service and the funeral (both in the rite of the Ukrainian Church) were arranged by her parents and sons in San Diego. Many of the friends and colleagues who had been closely associated with her were there. The memory of Helen's many good achievements will be with us for a long time.
Guy de Mallac Alexei A. Maradudin
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