Nina Gourfinkel

[1] During World War II she worked to provide housing for Jews and other displaced people in the Zone libre.

[2] She wrote on Russian theatre and literature, with translations and biographies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Stanislavski, Gogol, Lenin, Maxim Gorky and Chekhov.

[2] One of her first publications introduced Russian formalism to French literary criticism, and her later book on Tolstoy was influenced by the work of OPOJAZ members Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky.

[4] In summer 1940 Gourfinkel started working to provide relief for people displaced by World War II.

In 1941, together with Joseph Weill of OSE and Alexandre Glasberg, she helped found an organization providing hostels in the Zone libre for men and women, mostly Jews, who had been released from French internment camps.