Kitty Uksti Mazzarella

Kitty Mazzarella, born Külli Üksti (August 1, 1940) in Kuressaare, Saaremaa, Estonia, daughter of Valja and Aleksei Üksti, and sister of Thomas Uksti, died peacefully in her home in Alexandria, Virginia on Sunday, October 27. She was 84 years old. Consequences of a fall caused her death. She was a mother of four children, a cherished grandmother, a Peace Corps volunteer, an avid reader and polyglot who loved to explore and live in new places, and an award-winning teacher of English for immigrants and foreigners living in the United States.

As a child during WWII, Külli's family fled their homeland after learning her father was on a Soviet arrest list. They escaped by boat to Sweden and, after a year in a refugee camp, moved to the U.S. Külli chose the name "Kitty" at her mother's suggestion for an American name starting with "K." The family first settled with relatives in Harlem, NYC, then moved to Lakewood, NJ, home to an Estonian community, where Kitty attended high school. She later earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Douglass College at Rutgers University.

Starting in her early twenties, Kitty lived approximately 10 years in Italy, where she and her husband David, a newspaper correspondent and editor based in Rome, had all their children: Laura, David (deceased 1969), Julia (Julie), and Lilianna (Lily). Kitty studied Italian in a language school setting and became a fluent speaker, an experience that proved to be valuable in her later profession teaching English as a second language (ESL). After a divorce in 1995 and returning to Rutgers University to receive her master’s degree in education, Kitty joined the Peace Corps and was stationed in Pleven, Bulgaria for two years, where she taught students who wanted to learn English.

In 1999, Kitty became an instructor of ESL at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City, N.J. It proved to be an enormously successful employment, and eventually she became head of the department. In 2014 Kitty was awarded the college’s Philip Johnston award for excellence in teaching. She retired in 2017. A colleague at the college, Linda Guastini, upon learning of her death, said, “Kitty was a wonderful person and a great teacher. Her students loved her.”

Kitty was an adventurous life-long learner who continued to study languages and travel solo worldwide into her 70's. She was an extraordinary chef and baker who “learned it all from Julia Child.” She was an ardent supporter of artists and the arts, as well as many progressive charities, including Planned Parenthood, Doctors Without Borders, and Unicef.

Kitty is survived by her three daughters, sons-in-law Mark and Joshua, her brother, and her former husband, as well as her two beloved grandchildren, Sarah and Max.