Nina Kossman
Nina Kossman (Russian: Нина Косман [Kosman]; born in Moscow, USSR) is a bilingual Russian-American poet, memoirist, playwright, translator of Russian poetry, editor, and artist. Life and career. Nina Kossman was born in Moscow, emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972, spent some time in Israel, Ohio, Vermont, California, and Mexico; currently, she resides in New York. She has authored, edited, translated, or both edited and translated more than nine books in English and Russian. She is the recipient of an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) fellowship and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture and the Onassis  Public Benefit Foundation. Her poems have been translated from English into French, Russian; Spanish; Hebrew; Persian; Chinese; Danish, while "Behind the Border", her book of short stories about her childhood in the Soviet Union, has been translated into Japanese. In addition to writing in English (her second language), she writes poetry and prose in her first language, Russian, and has an extensive list of publications in major Russian-language journals, in and outside of Russia. In 2021, she became the founding editor of EastWest Literary Forum, a bilingual literary magazine, published in Russian & English. Literary critic Cynthia Haven writes in  The Bookhaven: “Twenty years ago, critic Harold Bloom wrote to the young poet Nina Kossman to tell her that her “intensely eloquent” translations of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva manage to “capture the doom-eager splendor of a superbly gifted poet.” W.S. Merwin wrote that these are “direct, strong, audible translations,” adding, “I hear Tsvetaeva’s voice, more of it, and in a new pitch, which makes something clear in her poems that I had only guessed at before.” Poet and literary critic Emma Lee writes in her review of Kossman’s book “Other Shepherds": “Nina Kossman was born in Russia  and is bilingual in Russian and English. Initially she wrote in Russian because ‘English was the language I had to use in the outside world—at school, in the city, etc. Instead, my poems sprang from the interior world, and at that age I resisted the outside world and created—possibly at the expense of a comfortable co-existence with my peers—a world of my own.’ The themes of alienation in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems spoke to Kossman’s experience.”  Canadian culture and literary critic Donald  Brackett writes about Kossman in his review of her book published in Critics  at Large: “Alienation and nostalgia are, of course, the bread and butter of most exiles, but in the case of Kossman, displaced in America during its own time of social and political upheaval (one hauntingly like our own era today), those emotional states, shared by the older poet, were intangibles that could potentially damage or even destroy a person if they gave in to them without resistance but which could, as Tsvetaeva herself so clearly demonstrated in a model manner, also transform themselves into the raw material for the art of poetry. Initially, consumed by and consuming what she called  this “cocktail of nostalgia, alienation and immersion in Tsvetaeva” enabled Kossman to embark upon the writing of her own poems, initially in Russian despite the fact that she was now "living" in English.” Russian literary critic and poet writes in his introduction to Kossman's poems in Emigrantskaya Lira, a major Russian poetry journal: "Nina Kossman's poems … combine ancient Greek myths with modern sensibility…She skillfully interweaves historical cultural layers with events of our time, creating her own picture of life, in its continuity and unity."  Aleksey Sinitsyn, a Russian literary critic and novelist, writes in his review of  the Russian edition of Kossman’s novel: “...this is intellectual prose of outstanding artistic merit [...] The author manages to show subtleties of communication between the individual and the collective, the factual and the mythological, the historical and the personal, and to demonstrate the connection that makes the fate of an individual inseparable from the fate of her people." Another Russian critic, , writes in her review of Kossman's novel "Queen of the Jews": “…our former compatriot Nina Kossman offers her own version of a love story, set against a backdrop of animosity. ... Her novel… is poetic, beautiful and stylistically original . It rehabilitates the concept of the literary use of ideology and points out a fatal mistake we all make when we begin to rely on common cliches, averting our eyes from reality.”  Early life and Family. Nina Kossman emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family in 1972 and came to the US in 1973.  Her father, , was a notable linguist, philologist, author of textbooks on German phraseology and English usage and grammar for Russian speakers, and journalist, who had emigrated from Russia twice (in 1918 and in 1972). He managed to leave Riga (Latvia) three days before the occupation  of Latvia by the Nazi army. All the remaining members of his family, including his wife (Teresa Jacobi) and mother (Ruth Brenson), perished in the Holocaust in Riga. Nina Kossman’s maternal grandfather was killed by Stalinists during the Great Terror. Her mother, Maya Borisovna Shternberg, was a notable biologist. Her paternal great-grandfather was Isidor Brenson, a notable physician and historian of Baltic medicine.