1915 – 2010
Leonid Kossman was a philologist, writer, and teacher whose language textbooks have helped millions of people. Born in Moscow in 1915, he spoke German and Russian at home and Latvian in the neighborhood as a child growing up in Riga, Latvia. After graduating from a German high school, he studied law at the University of Latvia. During this time, he married Tereza Yacoby.
Three days before the Nazis occupied Riga, he escaped east, stayed for a while as a refugee near Tashkent, Uzbekistan, soon got a summons to join the Soviet army, and was severely wounded near Staraya Russa in July 1942. His family in Riga was murdered. He spent the rest of the war in Kazakhstan, where he slowly regained sight and movement.
With his wife and two children, he emigrated to the US via Israel in 1972 and worked as a college languages teacher and as a writer for the German-American daily Staatszeitung and the German-Jewish American weekly Aufbau.
Newspaper articles by Leonid Kossman
In the late 1970s, he started writing books to help other Russians learn English.
In authorized–and pirated–editions these books have circulated very widely, and have been adopted by American university Russian courses.
He wrote short stories and published a historical novel, Above Water, in 2003.
Leontii Kossman m. Rebeka Bokser Isidore Brenson m. Klara Herzenberg
