Nina Gourfinkel

Nina Lazavrevna Gourfinkel or Gurfinkel (1898 - 1984) was a Russian Jewish writer living in France. During World War II she worked to provide housing for Jews and other displaced people in the Zone libre. She wrote on Russian theatre and literature, with translations and biographies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Stanislavski, Gogol, Lenin, Maxim Gorky and Chekhov.
Life.
Nina Gourfinkel was born to Jewish parents in Odessa. Her father was a doctor who had previously practiced in Saint Petersburg. She studied in Russia, where she was a close friend of Lydia Ginzburg. 
In 1925 Gourfinkel moved to Paris. 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. She was a friend of Irène Némirovsky, and established herself as an expert on contemporary Russian theatre. 
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. She continued working for the organization in Lyon after the war.