Heidi Dawidoff, 86

Heidi Dawidoff, 86, a legendary New Haven high school teacher, died peacefully on August 13, 2024, at her home in Francestown, New Hampshire, where she lived for her final 24 years.

Maria Gerschenkron, known to all as Heidi, was born on October 23, 1937, in Vienna, the second daughter of Alexander and Erica Gerschenkron. Just after the German annexation, in March 1938, the family fled Austria in four directions. Heidi was smuggled out of the country by a Dutch minister, who took her to Rotterdam, where she remained for half a year, before reuniting with her family in England. She crossed the Atlantic on RMS Aquitania, and the United States by train, and spent her childhood in Berkeley, California; Washington, DC; and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was an economics professor at Harvard.

Heidi received, as she always said, ​“an excellent progressive education” from inspiring teachers at the Shady Hill School and the Cambridge School of Weston. In 1960 she earned an English literature degree magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe. On a visit to Camp Walt Whitman in New Hampshire, where she had worked as a counselor, she’d met a current counselor, Donald Dawidoff, a Yale law student. They married in 1960 and she began her teaching career in New Haven, at the Day Prospect Hill School for girls.

After a short marriage, which took her to New York City and then Washington DC, she returned to New Haven with her two children, Nicholas and Sally. After her adored sister Susi Gerschenkron Wiener died, she was much more than an aunt to Susi’s son Jonathan Wiener and daughter Lisa (Wiener) Rentzler, her cherished nephew and niece.

Heidi resumed teaching at Day Prospect Hill, which in 1972 merged with a boys school across town and became Hopkins. Over nearly forty years, her thousands of students knew a fully engaged, completely original teacher who helped them to share her impassioned understanding of Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Thoreau, Woolf, Wharton and Baldwin. Her students remember an instructor who knew them so well as individuals that she helped them to better know themselves. Heidi said, ​“I love all of my students, and I love them all equally yet differently – for who they are.”

By teaching sophisticated courses in reading and writing, she offered generations of young people an education in high standards of critical thinking, personal ethics, compassion, idealism, and the virtues of a receptive heart and a free imagination. Every submitted essay, story, poem and examination were graded and then returned the very next day, abloom with red ink corrections, critique, praise and encouragement. She said, ​“I wanted students to have a response to what they wrote right away.”

In 1989, Heidi published a book Between The Frames: Thinking about Movies, which sold out its entire print run. All this didn’t leave much time for anything else in life, but the Church of the Redeemer, and its minister, Arthur Bradley, soothed days as a working single mother that were rich with friendship and professional fulfillment, but never easy.

Upon retirement, in 2000, Heidi moved to an eighteenth-century farmhouse in rural New Hampshire, where she lived as Emma Woodhouse might have in later life, a lively community leader who led a Tuesday Academy study group for women, curated a library film screening series, was a library trustee during a time of expansion, was a dedicated member of the Community Church, as well as a craft group, and especially the Francestown Democratic Committee. She wrote highly opinionated essays on classic literature for the Francestown News, and highly opinionated essays on contemporary politics and public life for the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. Her neighbors of all political persuasions were devoted to her, and she to them — but only after she’d walked her daily six miles and written at least as many letters by hand.

She leaves to mourn her two children; her nephew and niece; her daughter-in-law, Kaari Pitkin; Jonathan’s wife Ginger Young and Lisa’s husband Mitchell Rentzler; her nephews Andre Fresco and Dylan Fresco; Andre’s wife Lisa Fresco; her grandchildren, Oscar Pitkin and Beatrix Pitkin; Jonathan and Ginger’s children, Alexander Young, Caleb Young and Caroline Young; beloved family from the Dawidoff/Rosenberg/Sussman side; and many dear friends, former colleagues and, of course, her students. She was predeceased by her sister, her sister-in-law Judith Fresco, and her aunt and uncle, Lydia and Peter Seward.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Heidi Dawidoff and Tony Giamatti Fund for New Haven Scholars and English Teachers of Promise at Hopkins School.