Nina Gourfinkel

Origins and early life

Nina Gourfinkel was born in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, in 1900, in a cultivated and assimilated Jewish family; her father was a physician.

Work and career

She came to Paris in the 1920s and made herself one of the principal French interpreters of Russian literature and theatre, writing on Stanislavsky, Gorky and the Russian stage and translating steadily from the Russian. When France fell she went south and took charge of a committee for aid to refugees, working with the Direction des centres d'accueil, the body that could legally take foreign internees out of the French camps and place them in reception centres; under the cover name Camille-Madeleine Gabelle she used those channels to get Jews out of Gurs and the other camps and to hide them, and when the organisation had to be dissolved the work continued under the wing of the Amitié chrétienne of Abbé Glasberg and Cardinal Gerlier.

She wrote about all of it afterwards in Aux prises avec mon temps, two volumes published in 1953, which move from a Russian Jewish childhood in Odessa to the France of 1945. With Abbé Glasberg she founded after the war the Centre d'orientation sociale des étrangers, which took in refugees for decades and, after 1962, the Harkis. Her biography of Lenin appeared in 1959. She died at Dijon on 6 February 1984.