Among his former students was Ian Kelly ’79, former U.S. Ambassador to Georgia, currently Ambassador (ret.) in Residence in the Roberta Buffett International Studies Program.
“Irv Weil was the Caruso of lecturers. Students in his packed classes felt his deep passion for Russian literature, especially when he would declaim a Pushkin poem, or even sing it if it had been set to music,” Kelly told the Chicago Tribune. “I met my future wife in one of his classes, and we would joke with him that there are now 10 more people in the world (four children and six grandchildren) because of him.”
Weil was born in Cincinnati in 1928 and grew up with a passion for baseball, music and the stage. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, he spent a year studying at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in New York City and worked in professional theater, both on and off Broadway, an experience that would inform his dramatic teaching style.
After completing a master’s degree in linguistics at UChicago, Weil spent three years at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., researching the population of the Soviet Union in the early 1950s with renowned sociologist Eugene M. Kulischer. He continued his graduate studies in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University, completing his Ph.D. He taught at Brandeis University prior to joining the Northwestern faculty.
Dedicated to strengthening cultural connections between Russia and the U.S., Weil helped establish the now-shuttered American Studies Center at Moscow University for the Humanities in the early 1990s. Among the many projects he participated in was a TV competition between Soviet and American high school students focused on knowledge of literature. The competition location alternated between Moscow and Chicago and the programs were viewed by more than 3 million Russians.
In 2015, he published “From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds,” a memoir chronicling moments from his childhood as a baseball fan — his father Sidney Weil was the owner of the Cincinnati Reds at that time — through his travels to Russia and decades as a professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern.
His memoir highlights the experience of serving as a guide and interpreter for the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was awarded an honorary degree from Northwestern in 1973. Weil was the intermediary at the composer’s public events in Evanston and Chicago, which attracted intense press attention because of the then-ongoing Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
“My dad was as excited as I’d ever seen him over the Shostakovich happening,” said Weil’s son Daniel. “So much so that he was quoted in Time magazine (perhaps the country’s most influential news publication back then) saying, ‘I feel like I’ve just talked to Beethoven.’”
Weil is preceded in death by his wife, Vivian Weil, professor emeritus of ethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The couple were married for more than 65 years. Weil is survived by a daughter, Alice; sons Daniel and Martin; and two grandchildren, Nathan and Anna.
Great literature and music remained a touchstone throughout Weil’s life. In a 2015 interview with the Daily Northwestern, he said, “Of all things that men fear, the strangest thing to me is death,” quoting Shakespeare. “Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”
A memorial service will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 24, at Alice Millar Chapel, 1870 Sheridan Road, Evanston.
