YAKOBSON, Helen B(ates) 1913-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 21, 1913, in St. Petersburg, Russia; died of cardiopulmonary arrest December 4, 2002, in Washington, DC. Educator, journalist, and author. Yakobson was a respected professor of Russian at George Washington University. When she was a young girl, her parents fled Russia during the 1917 revolution and ended up in China, where Yakobson attended school. She graduated with a law degree from the University of Harbin in 1934, but ended up teaching Russian language and literature for two years, before the Japanese invasion of China led her to immigrate to the United States in 1937. During World War II she worked for the Voice of America, and during the late 1940s was a script-writer and announcer for Russian programs for the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. In 1951 she joined the faculty at George Washington University, where she was a professor of Russian until she retired in 1983; she was also chair of the Russian Department from 1958 to 1969. Yakobson wrote several Russian textbooks, including A Guide to Conversational Russian (1960) and Conversational Russian: An Intermediate Course (1985), and was also author of the autobiography Crossing Borders: From Revolutionary Russia to China to America (1994). She received several awards for her teaching, including, most recently, a 1995 award from the Russian Embassy for "preservation and development of Russian cultural and spiritual values."

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Washington Post, December 6, 2002, p. B7.