Xenia Boodberg Lee

Xenia Boodberg was born in Oakland, California,[1] the only child[2] of Peter A. Boodberg (1903-1972) and Elena (Helen) Boodberg (1896-1980). Her father was a Russian-born Baltic German linguistics scholar and professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California in Berkeley.[3] Her aunt Valentina A. Vernon recalled that her parents tried to raise her without speaking English as a small child, "only French and Russian".[4]

Xenia Boodberg was creative child, publishing poems and stories in the Berkeley newspaper at age 8,[5] and winning an essay contest on fire prevention from the Berkeley Lodge of Elks, also in 1936.[6] She was performing at public events as a pianist before and into her early teens.[7][8][9] She earned an associate in arts degree at the University of California in 1948.[10] She also studied with pianist Egon Petri at Mills College,[11][12] and with pianist Adolph Baller.[13]

Soon after college, in January 1949, she gave a program of piano music by composers Darius Milhaud, Roger Sessions, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, Béla Bartók, and Claude Debussy in New York, of which The New York Times reviewer commented, "Miss Boodberg remains a pianist of unusual potentialities, especially in the field of new music".[14] She played recitals and concerts, especially twentieth-century works,[15] in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere, often and for many years afterwards,[16][17][18][19][20] into the 1970s.[21] She was a member of the San Francisco Musical Club and played with the Oakland Symphony and the Stockton Symphony.[22]

Before February 1950, Xenia Boodberg married Richard Henry Lee, a marine sargeant and Korean War veteran,[23] and a descendant of American founding father Richard Henry Lee.[24] They had two children, Richard and Julie.[4] She died in 2004, aged 76 years.[25]