Obituaries

Elsa Anna-Berta PageSwedish Teacher

Elsa Anna-Berta Jakobson Page, 89, who was a teacher and principal at a Swedish-language school in Northern Virginia, died of a bowel obstruction April 5 at Virginia Hospital Center. She lived at the Jefferson retirement facility in Arlington.

Mrs. Page, who went by Anna-Berta, was born in Karlstad, Sweden, and worked as an au pair in England in the late 1930s. In 1943, she married a U.S. naval officer assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm. They moved to Alexandria in 1946 and settled in McLean in 1957.

She also lived at various times in London, Athens, Budapest, The Hague and Okinawa. In Okinawa, she taught swimming to Americans and English to the Japanese.

Mrs. Page was a member of Redeemer Lutheran Church in McLean and helped design the church's memorial garden based on her memories of churches in Sweden.

She began teaching Swedish at Svenska Skolan, a language school currently in Falls Church, and served as its principal in the 1970s.

Mrs. Page served on the board of the Swedish-American Cultural Union. She occasionally did translations for National Geographic magazine and in 1976 received a medal from the king of Sweden for her leadership in Washington's Swedish community.

She regularly made visits to Sweden until the mid-1990s. She enjoyed square dancing and was a Cub Scout den mother.

Her husband of 54 years, Elden L. Page, died in 1997.

Survivors include a son, Peter L. Page of Washington.

-- Matt Schudel