Helen Weil, Russian Studies, Irvine - my heart is broke
I had the privlige of knowing this person. I was only 23 or 4 but she was amazing. I will never forget the stories she told me of her family's flight from Ukraine. I got to live with her for a brief time.
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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
