mashavorobieva
Masha Vorobieva
(1934-2001)
Masha Voribieva was born in Lithuania and came to the U.S. as a teenager in the early 1950s. Her father got a job teaching Russian at Smith College, and Masha graduated from that institution, going on for an M.A. in NYU. She taught first at a private school in New England, later teaching in one of the City University institutions (CUNY). In 1964 she was teaching Russian in the Indiana Summer School course in Bloomington, IN.
Masha Vorobieva was hired at Vassar College to teach Russian language in the late 1970s. A dedicated and talented teacher, she was loved by all her students and well respected by her colleagues. Her gentle sense of humour and great passion for Russian language and culture highly enriched the student-teacher communication at the Russian Department at Vassar.
Masha taught at Vassar until May of 2000 (but only part-time in 1999-2000), focusing on language courses, instruction of first and second-year Russian being her specialty. During her Vassar years, she spent three summers helping out at an orphanage in a provincial Russian town near Moscow, on two of these occasions bringing along Vassar students who participated in this enterprise. She helped to arrange the adoption of Serezha from this institution by her former Vassar student. (The adoptive parents, tragically, were killed in an airplane crash in 2005, but Serezha was not with them and is now living in the Western U.S.)
Masha had quiet but very definite political views. During the late 1980s when Sakharov was living in semi-house arrest in Gorky, Masha served as a translator for a succession of New York politicians and intellectuals who made a point of calling Sakharov weekly to express their support. (The idea was that to let the Soviet authorities -- who would obviously be listening -- know that Sakharov was not forgotten.) The calls were made from Masha's New York apartment, which she kept throughout her Vassar years, and where she usually stayed on weekends. The Soviet authorities naturally resented Masha's involvement, and on her trip to the USSR with a Vassar group at some point in this period, she was strip-searched on the way out, delaying the group's departure by an hour.
Masha's apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village was situated in the same house as Joseph Brodsky's flat, and she became very good friends with the poet (as well as with his wife when he married). This allowed Vassar's Russian Dept. to invite Brodsky twice to poetry readings at Vassar. In general, Masha had a huge number of friends in New York, and returned there on weekends largely for that reason.
Masha is buried in Cambridge, MA, next to the graves of her parents. Her only living relative is a cousin who gave a sum of money to Vassar in Masha's memory, with the yearly accrued interest to be used to help fund the summer study of Russian for a deserving Vassar student.
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