Remembering Zita Dabars

Exuberant. Exacting. A force of nature. Warm. Supportive. High standards and equally high spirits.

The same words echo again and again when Dr. Zita Dabars’ former students and colleagues describe the legendary Friends School Russian teacher. Dabars, who died peacefully at home on November 10, 2021, at age 83, taught Russian at Friends School from 1975 until her retirement in 1997.  

Her impact stretched well beyond her 22 years at Friends. She led the creation of national foundational textbooks and programs to further Russian language and culture in high schools and colleges across the U.S. Her greatest legacy, though, is the inspiration she gave to generations of Friends students.

“Zita got Russian into your bones. She really touched people and her love of Russian culture was infectious,” says Melissa Feliciano ’86, who taught Middle School and Upper School Russian at Friends from 1991 until 1996.

Roots of Passion and Purpose

Lives of consequence often have beginnings when purpose and passion are forged. Born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, as a child, Dabars fled her home with her parents and sister. They lived in a German displaced person’s camp before emigrating to the U.S. and becoming citizens.

Dabars enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington, earning her Ph.D. in Russian language and literature, and attracting the attention of Claire Walker H’80, P’60, ’62. In 1956, Walker founded the Russian program at Friends, among the first high school Russian programs to be offered at an American high school. Decades later, Friends’ Middle School Russian program, created by Carla van Berkum, was one of the first middle school Russian programs in the country.  

Dabars joined the Friends faculty in 1975, the year Walker retired, and capably took Walker’s lauded curriculum and equally celebrated role as a national leader to new levels. Walker had served as secretary for the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), a position that Dabars, who joined the ACTR board of directors in 1982, also held. Dabars served as ACTR president (1991-1995) and was volunteering for the ACTR in the months before her passing. Today, Lee Roby P’20, ’26, Upper School Russian teacher since 2002, serves on the ACTR Board.

Former ACTR president Jane Shuffleton wrote that, “Zita set a high standard for herself and those she worked with; her attention to detail extended to all aspects of her work with the Board and her impact on the state of K-12 Russian in the United States looms large to this day.”

Perhaps Dabars’ affinity for connecting people and opportunities may be traced to her family’s need for safe harbor during World War II. Lisa Countess experienced this when she joined the faculty in 1984 to teach Latin. “I knew nothing about teaching when I started, but Zita was always there with a smile and support,” she says. “Her existence showed me what it meant to be a teacher who made a difference.”

Famous for her Russian Old Year parties in mid-January, Dabars filled her home with former and current students, colleagues, and friends. The menu was a lavish buffet of Russian dishes. “I still make borscht using her basic recipe with ketchup – it’s one of the life hacks she taught me,” says Feliciano, who was a Russian and Soviet Studies major at Harvard and received her M.A. in Russian at Middlebury.

Dabars’ love of her cats and gardening was equally legendary. She volunteered at Baltimore cat shelters and visited memory-care facilities with her cats. At Oak Crest, the Parkville, Maryland senior living center where Dabars lived in her final years, she and her cats were energetic, welcoming fixtures.

Inspiring a Lasting Love of Russian

“She set high expectations for us and made us work hard,” recalls Elisa Shorr Frost ’88, P’19, ’22 , who, like her mentor, received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. “She loaded on the summer homework (long lists of seemingly random vocabulary: cucumber, seven-year plan, parcel of land, to envision) and made participation in annual Russian-language competitions mandatory.”

“I had decided I wanted to be a Russian teacher even before I left high school, which means that my notion of what it meant to be a Russian teacher was based almost solely on Zita,” says Frost, who teaches Russian at Roland Park Country School. Both she and Feliciano traveled to Russia on the annual trip Dabars led. The intense, pre-trip (pre-Google) preparation was as memorable as the trip itself. Frost remembers months of memorizing points of interest for the 1987 trip to Moscow, Leningrad, and Zita’s birthplace of Riga.  

“With Scotch tape and markers, we assembled and colored our own maps of the cities from photocopied pages,” she explains. “This was in anticipation of a major pre-trip test to identify photos by name and show where everything was located on a map. Naturally, we had to do it all in Russian.”

Students researched paintings and artists in the museums they would visit, amazing the Russian tour guides with their knowledge. Forgoing pre-planned itineraries by tour groups, Dabars used her vast connections to arrange visits to schools and landmarks. “She also let us loose, confident that we were armed with the knowledge and skills to get around on our own,” Frost adds. “The Soviet Union was not your typical playground, but it became that for us.”  

Attorney Thora Johnson ’88, P’18, ’20, ’30, who earned a M.A. in Russian from Middlebury prior to her law degree, remembers well the exhilaration of traveling with Dabars: “We studied hours before going on that trip. With that knowledge, she then allowed us tremendous independence to discover those cities. It made Russia very personal. It was not some foreign and scary country, but a country filled with people we knew and were friends with.  And her classes went beyond Russian language and included culture, cooking, and history.”

To raise money for the trips, in 1979, Dabars created the Claire Walker Russian Film Festival, which screened contemporary and classic Russian and Slavic films at the  Baltimore Museum of Art for 11 years. Students handled the box office, sold t-shirts, and managed the refreshment stand replete with a Russian menu. “I made hard-boiled eggs garnished with caviar and Russian tea cakes,” recalls Feliciano.

Dabars passed on a way of approaching life, too. “It was all in the details for her,” says Feliciano, who became a Harford County public defender. “She was constantly doing better, and I often ask myself, ‘Is that enough? Have I done my best?’ I give it my all because that was her work ethic.”

Creating Global Citizens

“She made us feel like cultural ambassadors in the larger community,” says Frost. “[Zita] took every opportunity to put us in situations where we could use our Russian. This was at a time when such opportunities were limited, so we did things – like meeting Russian jockeys and horse trainers who had come to race in Laurel, Maryland—that were unexpected and exciting.”

“Zita and the Friends Russian program changed my life,” says Shawn Dorman ’83, editor-in-chief of The Foreign Service Journal and director of publications for the American Foreign Service Association. “The Soviet Union trip, with the lofty program name of Promoting Enduring Peace, did in fact inspire me to want to build bridges, continue learning about the dark, ‘evil empire’ of the Cold War that was also filled with wonderful people, fascinating cultures, beautiful language.”

“She was tough, but she inspired us to want to do well, and her passion for all things Russian was contagious,” says Dorman, who majored in Soviet Studies and Government at Cornell University, earned a M.A. in Russian Area Studies at Georgetown University, and worked for the U.S. Department of State in Moscow and St. Petersburg before becoming a U.S. diplomat. “I joined the Foreign Service right around the time the Soviet Union was coming apart, hoping I’d get to serve in one of the new countries, and indeed, got to serve in Kyrgyzstan helping to set up the new U.S. Embassy there.”

“Zita exposed us to another world, other cultures, the responsibility to try to be a force for good in the world, to not see the Soviet Union as a monolith but rather as a complex country where regular citizens were ‘just like us’ and did not want war,” Dorman adds, noting that Dabars’ lessons were philosophical and practical. “Zita taught us to bribe our way into the Bolshoi with packs of pantyhose.” 

Roby continues many of Dabars’ rich teaching traditions. Pre-pandemic, she led an every-other-year spring break trip to St. Petersburg (with the same amount of pre-trip preparation). She hosts monthly Russian film viewings at Friends, advises the Russian club, and more. Her students are teachers in the school’s community partnership, “Russian for Fun,” an afterschool exploratory Russian language and culture program hosted at Friends for both FS and Tunbridge Elementary School fourth and fifth graders.

“I’ve always been aspiring to hold up her legacy,” says Roby, who in December 2021, won the Russian and East European Institute (REEI) Distinguished Alumni Award from Indiana University, where she is a Ph.D. candidate. “Russian is a hard language for students to study successfully. Zita taught me that you can hold very high expectations for students while supporting and mentoring them.”

And yes, Friends students still make Russian dishes. When Dabars’ health prevented her from hosting the Russian Old New Year’s Party at her home, Roby and Shannon Johnson, the former Middle School teacher,  moved the event to the James L. Zamoiski ’68 Alumni Center on campus. Students organize the event and prepare the food as their mid-term assessment.

“There’s lots of linguistic tasks with the event set-up, which are done in Russian,” Roby says. Guests at the event continue to be FS students, alumni, faculty, and the network of Russian-speaking friends that Dabar cultivated, including judges for the ACTR Olympiada of Spoken Russian Olympiada, which Walker created in 1975 so pre-college Russian students could converse with native speakers in annual competitions.

“[Prior to the party], we talk about what dishes are on the Russian holiday table, and the students watch YouTube videos of the nine dishes on the menu,” Roby explains. “After the class lottery for dishes – no one wants the herring under a fur coat – the students cook. It’s a great cultural learning curve.”

A National Legacy of Leadership

In 1985, then-headmaster Byron Forbush ’47, P’72, 75, 78 asked Tad Jacks H’05, P’08, then director of admission and later assistant head of school, to serve as director of special projects. One of his special projects, Jacks quips, was Dabars. “She was tireless, tenacious, and, at times, annoying,” he says, “Zita was like a dog with a bone to get something accomplished, but it was wonderful.”

The Center of Russian Language and Culture (CORLAC), which Dabars founded in 1985, was such a project. CORLAC helped to change how Russian is taught in high schools and smaller colleges across the country. Jacks and Stanley Johnson, head of the Upper School would “birddog her grant applications.”

Jacks recalls an all-nighter on Friday night with Zita to finish an application due the next day at noon. Jacks, a competitive golfer, was due to compete in a tournament that weekend. “At 6:30 a.m., the sun was coming up on the Friends campus, and I said to Zita, ‘I have to play golf.’ She didn’t really get it, but we finished, and off I went, punch-tired.”

Jacks shot his first hole-in-one that day, and the grant was successful. During her tenure as CORLAC director, which disbanded in 1997, Dabars raised $2.2 million.

For eight years, CORLAC hosted a month-long summer teaching institute at Bryn Mawr College, funded by a National Endowment of Humanities grant. It was the only professional development program of its kind in the States. Russian language sessions were peppered with Russian folk dancing, music, spontaneous sing-alongs of Russian songs (joyfully led, it’s easy to imagine, by Dabars), and informal networking so critical to teaching.

“She knew everyone, and everyone knew her,” recalls Frost, whom Dabars tapped as a CORLAC program assistant the summer Frost graduated. “She was a real mentor, already treating me as a junior colleague and making me at home in the professional world that I wanted to be a part of.”

With CORLAC colleagues, Dabars co-authored the first national, pre-college Russian language textbook series, in addition to co-writing other seminal (and still used) texts and producing VHS instructional materials to accompany each textbook. “These materials were really path-breaking at the time, the first of their kind in Russian-language teaching,” Roby explains.

Some videos featured Russian high school students, something unfamiliar to most Americans in the 90s, while the fourth text in the series,  Mir russikh – The World of Russians, gave video glimpses of actual Russian spaces: a wedding ceremony in a Russian Orthodox church; a banya (Russian style baths); and a traditional Russian village. Adds Roby, “These were scenes not shown on American TV, as so this was really groundbreaking in the windows it opened into real authentic culture.”

Prior to the publication of any textbook, her Friends students created and carried a weighty tome of a binder, filled with the latest pedagogical methods and seemingly arcane vocabulary lists. Frost recalls that these were “treasure troves of materials that [Zita] created and curated over the years.”

Dabars picked up Walker’s leadership torch for the ACTR Olympiada in Maryland and added the ACTR National Russian Essay Contest for middle and high school students. In the early 2000s, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Olympiada split into Maryland and Washington, D.C./Virginia split. Roby now chairs the Maryland Olympiada. Today, Maryland and D.C./Virginia are two of the three largest Olympiada in the U.S., part of a program that began as a small but important initiative that now has 18 regional Olympiadas across the country.

In 1972, Walker took the first American team to compete in the International Olympiada in Moscow, including David Chang ’72, Teresa Redd ’72, and Marjorie Styrt ’73, who each medaled. Since several other Friends students have been selected for the U.S. Delegation to the International Olympiada.

In addition to receiving the Pushkin Prize in 1990, Dabars received the Joe Malik Service Award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (1991) and the ACTR/American Councils for International Education Distinguished Service Award (1997).  

Jacks sums up her life and legacy best. “Her students and the school were her life and keeping Russian alive in high schools was her life’s work.”

Dabars is survived by nieces Lyla Leigh and Laura McDonald, nephews Austin McDonald and Thomas McDonald, Jr., and great nephews. A January 2022 memorial service at Friends was postponed due to COVID-19 and will be rescheduled.

Written by Sarah Achenbach