Obituary of Tamara Gavrilenko Van Atta

Tamara Gavrilenko Van Atta Tamara Terent'evna Gavrilenko Van Atta, a resident of Chapel Hill since 2000, passed away early on the morning of June 16. Tamara Gavrilenko Van Atta was born on December 21, 1949, in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), the second child of Terentii Ivanovich and Mariia Arsen'evna Gavrilenko. Both her parents lived through the 900-day German siege of Leningrad during World War II, laying the foundation for lifelong pride and some nagging health problems. She grew up in a one-room basement apartment in Leningrad, excelling at dance and sports. A graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Movie Engineering, she worked in acoustics research, designed and sewed women's clothing to order for private customers, and was involved in the distribution of uncensored "samizdat" literature and the underground arts scene in her native city. Tamara Gavrilenko met and married Donald Van Atta, an American graduate student then studying the Russian language in Leningrad, at the end of 1977. The Soviet authorities allowed her to emigrate to the US to join her new husband in April of 1978. The family lived in Berkeley, California, until 1984, when they moved to upstate New York to take a college teaching position. She worked at many jobs to help her American husband complete his doctorate, gave birth to two children, and followed the many changes of residence and country her husband's profession of studying the USSR occasioned. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, she lived with her family for long periods of time in Paris, Ukraine, and the Republic of Georgia, in each case actively involving herself in the international and local communities. The family purchased a house in Chapel Hill in 1998 and moved into it in 2000. After 2005, Tamara Van Atta's health worsened, so she stayed at home while her husband worked for lengthy periods of time outside the US in a variety of positions as an international development consultant. An outgoing person, she loved to help students of Russia and Russian and made many other volunteer contributions to the communities in which she lived. Discovering that her husband could not cook, she learned to be a gourmet cook. Her death was the result of an accident, a fall on the patio of her home in Chapel Hill. Her husband and children were with her when she passed. Her parents and her elder brother, Evgenii Terent'evich Gavrilenko, preceded her in death. Tamara Van Atta is survived by her husband, Donald Van Atta and daughter Alissa Van Atta, of Chapel Hill, son Daniel Van Atta of Seattle, Washington, and a niece, Natal'ia Gavrilenko, of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The family is holding a private memorial service.