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المستشرق: في فض غموض حياة غريبة وخطيرة
أسعد بيه كارهٌ للثورات. كانت كل ثورة سياسية بعد أخرى سابقة لها تترك إنسانًا بلا وطن، وطريدًا وفارًا من كل أرض قرر أن يجعل منها وطنًا. الناجي من الإرهاب البلشفي الروسي، يكره البلاشفة لأنهم شيعوا آبار نفط أبيه واستولوا على بيت عائلته في باكو وجعلوا منه مقرًا لقيادة ستالين. ثم ضحية للإرهاب الألماني، وكره النازي لأنهم خربوا وحطموا دار النشر التي كانت تنشر كتبه في برلين، وأحرقوا كتبه التي كتبها عن روسيا دون حتى أن يدركوا أنه يكتب ضد البلشفية لا ضدهم. غير أن محمد أسعد بيك، وبغرابة شديدة، كان يزدهر وينتعش تحت وطأة الاضطهاد.
622 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2005
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4,920 people want to read
About the author
Tom Reiss
8books223followersTom Reiss is the author of the celebrated international bestseller The Orientalist. His biographical pieces have appeared The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.
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May 9, 2011
The Orientalist is, in the end, the story of one man’s accidental obsessive search for another man’s story. While in Baku (present day capital of Azerbaijan) writing a story about the revival of the oil business, Tom Reiss is handed a copy of Ali and Nino by a person called “Kurban Said,� and told that this book is both the Azeri “national novel� and the best introduction to the city he could possibly have. Soon, he finds that there is a huge controversy over the identity of the author- despite the novel’s cultural importance, no one seems to really know who this “Kurban Said,� was for sure, and everyone wants to claim him for one of their own. He becomes fascinated with the mystery and embarks on a whirlwind quest to find out just who this man was.
The author identifies the author of the novel as a man born to the name of Lev Nissumbaum, born on October 17, 1905 (Alert: history buffs, you might have reason to know this date) in Baku, Tiflis, or “noplace,� depending on the version of his birth story that you believe. Lev’s own version of his birth (found in his deathbed notebooks) essentially gives the framework of his entire life, so I will reproduce a part of it here:
“Born in�? Already here the problematic nature of my existence begins. Most people can name a house or at least a place where they were born� I was born during the first Russian railroad strike in the middle of the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia, when my mother was returning from Zurich, the seat of the Russian revolutionaries, to Baku, the seat of our family. On the day of my birth, the czar proclaimed his manifesto in which he granted the Russians a political constitution. On the day of my arrival in Baku the city was engulfed in the flames of Revolution, and the slaughtering of the mob…So began my existence. Father: an industrial magnate in the oil industry; mother: a radical revolutionary.�
The story of Lev’s life as it progresses essentially does not stray very far from any of these contradictions, and he fights them out visibly and painfully in public and private, in sources Reiss has found has far ranging as American tabloids and Lev’s deathbed notebooks, written to distract himself from horrible pain. Lev starts out with a pampered childhood in Baku, the son of a privileged Jewish (as you might imagine, that will become important later) oil millionaire, a little boy who runs away to the “Arabic� quarter of the city in order to escape, and sits staring over the desert on top of old, crumbling Muslim palaces- far far away from the replica of Paris many Westernized members of society were trying to create around his home. He is eventually allowed to go to school and spends several years in his youth at a Imperial Russian run school. The young Liova conceives a fascination with everything to do with the East- Muslims, the desert, Arabic art and clothes, swords, Persian and Arabic heroic tales(� To this day I do not know whence this feeling came...I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of Arabic edifices every night. I do know that it was the most powerful and formative feeling of my life�).
Fascinatingly, as an old lady who also lived in pre WWI Baku during the oil-boom years tells Reiss, “for a Jewish boy to assume a Muslim name and convert here in Baku would not have been anything so horrendous as it seems today� there was never anything rigid about this identity, quite the opposite. It was Bolshevism, the anti-religion of our time, that was rigid. We were simply open to the currents of the time in which we were born.� Indeed, Reiss opens up an entire place and time that was nearly forgotten, a muddled place where the strict lines of nation-states really didn’t mean very much. Near Baku, for instance, one could find an isolated German immigrant community who had created an entire replica of a Black Forest town, nomadic tribes from the desert come to trade, a community of “Wild Jews� who were not much aware that they were “Jews� in the way that Westerners thought of the concept, and, I swear to God, the red haired and blue eyed descendants of knights from the Crusades who still wore chain mail and painted crosses on their shields. In other words, the Caucuses was the dumping ground for all sorts of leftover groups no one had bothered to check up on ever again- and now here at the beginning of the 20th century these people were suddenly being found again- not at all remembering who it was they were supposed to be.
Lev and his father are forced to flee his beloved home of Baku twice, the second time never to return again, both times on account of the violence of the Russian Revolution, both times after hiding in the basement while mobs rioted overhead, fearing for their lives. He developed a hatred of revolutions from this period, all revolutions of any kind. He was terrified of them. From his point of view, Revolutions were just an excuse for mass violence, and were far too terrifyingly focused on sweeping away everything that came before it. Lev and his father flee eastward, protected by Muslim nomads, then nationalists, and then eventually coming under the protection of the Ottoman empire in its last, dying breath before the occupying forces arrive- before finally escaping into safety (and oh the irony of this later) in Paris and Germany.
Lev became a famous writer of essays on the “Orient�, passing himself off as some sort of Muslim prince (he did in fact convert to Islam at the Ottoman Embassy in Berlin, just before the Empire was officially dissolved). He joined the rebellious café society of Weimar Berlin, walking around town in full Orientalist gear- turbans, earrings, robes, swords and makeup and hobnobbing with communists, socialists, satiric cabaretists and in general all the oddballs of the Weimar era. He marries a Jewish millionaire’s daughter, spends some time in high society New York and Hollywood, getting fat and drinking away his health- and then chooses to come back to the heart of fascist Europe in the 1930s after he had already escaped to the safety of America. He called himself “Essad Bey,� now, or some hybrid of his real name and his new name “Essad Bey-Nussimbaum,� as if never quite sure how far he could really leave his past behind. But he tries very hard to hide in this persona, long before it would have become necessary due to any sort of outside forces. He told outrageous stories about his life- many of which turned out to be true in essentials. He was “exposed� many times (by “real� Muslims, by the anti-Semitic press, by rivals, by the army who didn’t like his too-truthful picture of what went on in the Caucuses while the German army was there during WWI), and yet somehow manages to carry it off, writing continually in this new persona, keeping everyone guessing as to who he really was. As anti-Semitism grew in Germany and with it the accusations of him being a “Jewish story-swindler,� Lev just kept writing- biographies (Stalin, Czar Nicholas- with whom he had a very strong identification), essays (on Muslim independence, the oil industry, and everything in between), style pieces, and eventually novels. His politics were often supported by one right-wing pre-Nazi ministry while his questionable ancestry was persecuted by another. He supported the more “moderate� form of fascism espoused by Mussolini before he radicalized, and wrote an “expose� of the Cheka, the Russian secret police of the time. His works were on the list of “approved reading� for Nazi Germany for many years into the war. When he died in Positano, Italy he died “the Muslim,� with a carved turban on top of his gravestone and his feet pointing towards Mecca.
Lev Nissumbaum spent his entire life trying to become the person that he believed that he was in the end. He spent his entire life looking back towards the past, even as a young boy, looking for a way to restore what he felt had been lost to him. He forged a new identity out of nothing but what he felt the world should look like- a romanticized portrait from his childhood that he couldn’t let go of, and he succeeded. I can’t even begin to do this book justice, writing the above hasn’t even covered a grain of what’s going on here. The issues of identity being addressed here are just mind-bogglingly amazing to engage with, and all the huge questions of the 20th century are here- how do we classify people, try to make them something else, how little choice the world gives people who want to be something else other than what the lines and borders of the modern world tell them they are meant to be. He kept on selling himself, right to the very end, like to stop selling his persona was to stop believing in it himself. There’s amazing statements here about the nature of “truth� and “truthiness�. As Reiss himself admits, the facts that you can trust least about Lev Nissumbaum are the basics for the time, “name, race, nationality.� Many of the tales Lev tells about himself are concocted, skewed, embellished� and yet never really not true. All the stories he told were about himself, even those that were ostensibly about others- the self that mattered far more than the categories that 20th century Europe made necessary for people to identify with. Only those basic facts are the real lies, the ones he felt he needed to devote a life’s work to obscuring in order to live the life that he wanted to, even before being a Jewish writer in Berlin was a real danger.
It’s just an amazing, exhilarating book from which I learned so much, a visceral experience of finding oneself seemingly literally against all the world. The Self triumphant, somehow, in a system that wants to destroy every last trace of it. I can't even express, I don't think, all that is amazing about this book. Reading this was, for me, one of those peak moments that Joseph Campbell describes when you find out that: "Ohhh.. ah.. ah.. ahh..."
Actually, weirdly, a quote from the other sort of biography I'm reading right now on Sarah Bernhardt I think explains excellently what is so captivating about Lev to me, being the way he was in the time he was it:
"Do you for a moment believe that my public wanted me to be like them? Do you think the world would have praised me to the skies if I had been just like everybody else? Really, what an absurd goal! Do you mean to say there isn't anyone among your contemporaries who would like to look like no one else on the face of the earth? No one who wants to set himself or herself apart from the common herd? Is here no one who wants to transcend the others, who wants to be adored by them, who wants to distance himself from them, and be adored by them precisely because he has distanced himself from them? What kind of time is this where everything is all blended into a meaningless nothing?
I feel sorry for you with all my heart."
The author identifies the author of the novel as a man born to the name of Lev Nissumbaum, born on October 17, 1905 (Alert: history buffs, you might have reason to know this date) in Baku, Tiflis, or “noplace,� depending on the version of his birth story that you believe. Lev’s own version of his birth (found in his deathbed notebooks) essentially gives the framework of his entire life, so I will reproduce a part of it here:
“Born in�? Already here the problematic nature of my existence begins. Most people can name a house or at least a place where they were born� I was born during the first Russian railroad strike in the middle of the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia, when my mother was returning from Zurich, the seat of the Russian revolutionaries, to Baku, the seat of our family. On the day of my birth, the czar proclaimed his manifesto in which he granted the Russians a political constitution. On the day of my arrival in Baku the city was engulfed in the flames of Revolution, and the slaughtering of the mob…So began my existence. Father: an industrial magnate in the oil industry; mother: a radical revolutionary.�
The story of Lev’s life as it progresses essentially does not stray very far from any of these contradictions, and he fights them out visibly and painfully in public and private, in sources Reiss has found has far ranging as American tabloids and Lev’s deathbed notebooks, written to distract himself from horrible pain. Lev starts out with a pampered childhood in Baku, the son of a privileged Jewish (as you might imagine, that will become important later) oil millionaire, a little boy who runs away to the “Arabic� quarter of the city in order to escape, and sits staring over the desert on top of old, crumbling Muslim palaces- far far away from the replica of Paris many Westernized members of society were trying to create around his home. He is eventually allowed to go to school and spends several years in his youth at a Imperial Russian run school. The young Liova conceives a fascination with everything to do with the East- Muslims, the desert, Arabic art and clothes, swords, Persian and Arabic heroic tales(� To this day I do not know whence this feeling came...I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of Arabic edifices every night. I do know that it was the most powerful and formative feeling of my life�).
Fascinatingly, as an old lady who also lived in pre WWI Baku during the oil-boom years tells Reiss, “for a Jewish boy to assume a Muslim name and convert here in Baku would not have been anything so horrendous as it seems today� there was never anything rigid about this identity, quite the opposite. It was Bolshevism, the anti-religion of our time, that was rigid. We were simply open to the currents of the time in which we were born.� Indeed, Reiss opens up an entire place and time that was nearly forgotten, a muddled place where the strict lines of nation-states really didn’t mean very much. Near Baku, for instance, one could find an isolated German immigrant community who had created an entire replica of a Black Forest town, nomadic tribes from the desert come to trade, a community of “Wild Jews� who were not much aware that they were “Jews� in the way that Westerners thought of the concept, and, I swear to God, the red haired and blue eyed descendants of knights from the Crusades who still wore chain mail and painted crosses on their shields. In other words, the Caucuses was the dumping ground for all sorts of leftover groups no one had bothered to check up on ever again- and now here at the beginning of the 20th century these people were suddenly being found again- not at all remembering who it was they were supposed to be.
Lev and his father are forced to flee his beloved home of Baku twice, the second time never to return again, both times on account of the violence of the Russian Revolution, both times after hiding in the basement while mobs rioted overhead, fearing for their lives. He developed a hatred of revolutions from this period, all revolutions of any kind. He was terrified of them. From his point of view, Revolutions were just an excuse for mass violence, and were far too terrifyingly focused on sweeping away everything that came before it. Lev and his father flee eastward, protected by Muslim nomads, then nationalists, and then eventually coming under the protection of the Ottoman empire in its last, dying breath before the occupying forces arrive- before finally escaping into safety (and oh the irony of this later) in Paris and Germany.
Lev became a famous writer of essays on the “Orient�, passing himself off as some sort of Muslim prince (he did in fact convert to Islam at the Ottoman Embassy in Berlin, just before the Empire was officially dissolved). He joined the rebellious café society of Weimar Berlin, walking around town in full Orientalist gear- turbans, earrings, robes, swords and makeup and hobnobbing with communists, socialists, satiric cabaretists and in general all the oddballs of the Weimar era. He marries a Jewish millionaire’s daughter, spends some time in high society New York and Hollywood, getting fat and drinking away his health- and then chooses to come back to the heart of fascist Europe in the 1930s after he had already escaped to the safety of America. He called himself “Essad Bey,� now, or some hybrid of his real name and his new name “Essad Bey-Nussimbaum,� as if never quite sure how far he could really leave his past behind. But he tries very hard to hide in this persona, long before it would have become necessary due to any sort of outside forces. He told outrageous stories about his life- many of which turned out to be true in essentials. He was “exposed� many times (by “real� Muslims, by the anti-Semitic press, by rivals, by the army who didn’t like his too-truthful picture of what went on in the Caucuses while the German army was there during WWI), and yet somehow manages to carry it off, writing continually in this new persona, keeping everyone guessing as to who he really was. As anti-Semitism grew in Germany and with it the accusations of him being a “Jewish story-swindler,� Lev just kept writing- biographies (Stalin, Czar Nicholas- with whom he had a very strong identification), essays (on Muslim independence, the oil industry, and everything in between), style pieces, and eventually novels. His politics were often supported by one right-wing pre-Nazi ministry while his questionable ancestry was persecuted by another. He supported the more “moderate� form of fascism espoused by Mussolini before he radicalized, and wrote an “expose� of the Cheka, the Russian secret police of the time. His works were on the list of “approved reading� for Nazi Germany for many years into the war. When he died in Positano, Italy he died “the Muslim,� with a carved turban on top of his gravestone and his feet pointing towards Mecca.
Lev Nissumbaum spent his entire life trying to become the person that he believed that he was in the end. He spent his entire life looking back towards the past, even as a young boy, looking for a way to restore what he felt had been lost to him. He forged a new identity out of nothing but what he felt the world should look like- a romanticized portrait from his childhood that he couldn’t let go of, and he succeeded. I can’t even begin to do this book justice, writing the above hasn’t even covered a grain of what’s going on here. The issues of identity being addressed here are just mind-bogglingly amazing to engage with, and all the huge questions of the 20th century are here- how do we classify people, try to make them something else, how little choice the world gives people who want to be something else other than what the lines and borders of the modern world tell them they are meant to be. He kept on selling himself, right to the very end, like to stop selling his persona was to stop believing in it himself. There’s amazing statements here about the nature of “truth� and “truthiness�. As Reiss himself admits, the facts that you can trust least about Lev Nissumbaum are the basics for the time, “name, race, nationality.� Many of the tales Lev tells about himself are concocted, skewed, embellished� and yet never really not true. All the stories he told were about himself, even those that were ostensibly about others- the self that mattered far more than the categories that 20th century Europe made necessary for people to identify with. Only those basic facts are the real lies, the ones he felt he needed to devote a life’s work to obscuring in order to live the life that he wanted to, even before being a Jewish writer in Berlin was a real danger.
It’s just an amazing, exhilarating book from which I learned so much, a visceral experience of finding oneself seemingly literally against all the world. The Self triumphant, somehow, in a system that wants to destroy every last trace of it. I can't even express, I don't think, all that is amazing about this book. Reading this was, for me, one of those peak moments that Joseph Campbell describes when you find out that: "Ohhh.. ah.. ah.. ahh..."
Actually, weirdly, a quote from the other sort of biography I'm reading right now on Sarah Bernhardt I think explains excellently what is so captivating about Lev to me, being the way he was in the time he was it:
"Do you for a moment believe that my public wanted me to be like them? Do you think the world would have praised me to the skies if I had been just like everybody else? Really, what an absurd goal! Do you mean to say there isn't anyone among your contemporaries who would like to look like no one else on the face of the earth? No one who wants to set himself or herself apart from the common herd? Is here no one who wants to transcend the others, who wants to be adored by them, who wants to distance himself from them, and be adored by them precisely because he has distanced himself from them? What kind of time is this where everything is all blended into a meaningless nothing?
I feel sorry for you with all my heart."
February 3, 2023
Tom Reiss tells the enigmatic story of Lev Nussimbaum, an Azerbaijani Jew from Baku on the Caspian Sea. Reiss claims Lev wrote ‘Ali and Nino� under the pen name of Kurban Said, first published in German in 1937, the love story between a young Muslim man and a Christian woman. It became for all purposes the national novel, translated into thirty languages. The origin of Said had been a mystery and source of dispute for decades before this 2005 book. Reiss traveled through ten countries following the trail of the elusive author whom had been known to write under the pseudonym of Essad Bey.
Lev was born in 1905 onboard a train from Kiev to Baku. His mother was a radical Bolshevik, his father a rich oil baron in Azerbaijan, then part of imperial Russia. 1905 was a year of political upheavals after a massacre of demonstrators in St. Petersburg sparked revolts across the empire. The rebellions were followed by Tsarist pograms, killing thousands of Jews in the Ukraine. Reiss begins in 1795 when Catherine the Great annexed Poland, acquiring a large Jewish population Russia didn’t have. Fearing foreign influence, the Pale of Settlement limited Jews migration through the empire.
Baku was far more culturally diverse, with a long history of Jewish, Christian and Muslim people intermingling. Reiss uses historical background to explore the world of Lev. By 1813 Russia had wrested the Caucasus from Iran and the region became European. Oil was so plentiful it floated on the sea and burst into flame in the hills inspiring Zoroaster. In the 1850’s its value was recognized, the Nobel brothers and Rothchilds arriving soon after. In 1861 Alexander II freed the serfs and enacted legal and educational reforms that permitted Jews to enroll in St. Petersburg universities.
Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by terrorists seeking to overthrow the throne and was succeeded by Alexander III, a strict authoritarian who repealed his father’s reforms. He died in 1894 and Nicholas II became the last Tsar. By 1901 Baku supplied half the world’s oil. The 1905 revolts engulfed the city in gangs, revolutionaries and Cossack soldiers. Lev’s mother secretly funded Stalin before she killed herself in 1911. He grew up in a sheltered house, only allowed outside with a retinue of retainers, and schooled at home in a large library, dreaming of the city’s palaces from his rooftop vista.
A descendant of Ashkenazi from Ukraine, Lev was enthralled with tribes of Jews and Muslims who lived in the mountains and desert for millennia. Facts were mixed with fiction as he fancied his father a fierce Muslim noble and a protector of the locals. The years leading up to WWI returned to stability but Russian defeats by the Kaiser in 1914 once again ignited revolts from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. In 1918 a civil war raged between the Red and White armies. Stalin had become Lenin’s leader in the Caucasus. Bolsheviks invaded as Lev hid in the basement with his father. They fled east from Baku.
As told in Lev’s 1929 book ‘Blood and Oil in the Orient�, they traversed Turkistan and Persia, witnessing war between the British, Russians and Turks. From Turkmenbashi across the Caspian Sea, where Bolshevik commissars were executed, they traveled by caravan to Bukhara over the desert, where captured German soldiers fought against Uzbek rebels. On their way back to Baku, Lev experienced Persian culture and religion, Shiites and Sufis, bandits, beggars and bazaars. Azerbaijan had been liberated from Bolsheviks by a coalition of Germans and Turks while the Tsar’s family was executed.
By the end of 1918 the Central Powers sued for peace and the British occupied Baku. After the 1919 Paris Peace Conference the Allied Powers pulled up stakes and left Azerbaijan to fend for itself. Within a year the Bolsheviks returned and ended the fledgling democracy. Lev’s father was forced to supply oil to Russia and Stalin became their unwanted house guest. The Bolsheviks declared a week of plunder as the proletariat cleaned out mansions and evicted families. They separated, planning to meet in Georgia and sail west on the Black Sea. Lev traveled alone over the Caucasus mountains at age 14.
Reunited with his father in 1920 on the border of Armenia and Georgia they left for Tbilisi. Lev found an eclectic mix of Kurds, Iranians, Russians, Arabs and Turks. Christian in the 4th century, crusader knights joined them from Jerusalem in the 14th. The mountains were populated with lost tribes and ancient nobility. Ottoman expansion during the 16th century converted many to Islam. The city was overcrowded with Russians headed to Batumi, a port on the Black Sea. They escaped by steamship to Istanbul, then occupied by the British, French and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Lev saw Istanbul as a giant analog of Baku; a cosmopolitan amalgam of east meets west, tolerant of diversity, sublimely historical. It was in decline in 1921, with Ataturk in rebellion against the Sultanate and Allies. Attempts to restore Hagia Sophia to Christianity fueled pan-Islamic and anti-British movements. By 1924 the Caliphate was abolished and the royal family exiled. Reiss uses an unpublished autobiography found in Vienna to track Lev’s odyssey through Italy, France and Germany. As he departed by ship on the Adriatic he was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the old world of the Orient.
Collapse of the Romanov, Ottoman and Hapsburg empires would unleash a cycle of genocide among the new European nations. Many Jews and minority ethnic groups mourned the loss of emperors who had maintained a modicum of safety and civilization. Jews and Gypsies were among a few groups that could not claim ancestral lands in Europe. Lev adopted a new persona, a partly Ottoman or Persian prince rather than a stateless refugee. In Rome he recognized a new threat in fascism, the right wing reaction to communism. Paris was a favored destination for Russians fleeing the revolution.
In 1921 Lev was of age to attend university. He and his father left Paris to go to Germany. Reiss describes the implosion of the Second Reich three years earlier. Leftist revolutions had brewed in Berlin, from a mutinous navy to rival red gangs battling in the streets. Ex-military formed militias to fight them, marching east to join the White Army’s war with the Bolsheviks. Lenin formed his Red Army of 80,000 to seize German industry; proto-Nazi veterans of Verdun crushed the operation. The government was stuck in the middle between radical groups, as father and son crossed over from France.
Holdings of Baku oil magnates collapsed in 1922 as markets realized the Bolsheviks were there to stay. Nearly broke, they joined thousands of Russian emigrés in Berlin where living costs were cheap. In prewar years Germany had grown to be the 2nd largest economy after the US, Berlin a mix of grand neoclassical buildings and barrack style housing for millions of new residents. The postwar Weimar Republic attracted the world’s most creative artists, writers, musicians, scientists. Lev was schooled with the families of Pasternak, Chagall and Nabokov. Along with new immigrants came antisemitism.
‘The Protocols of Zion�, 1903 Tsarist police propaganda, was printed in German after 1920, claiming an international conspiracy of Jewish capitalists, or incongruently socialists. It inflamed old prejudices; liberal and Jewish politicians were assassinated by the hundreds. Already multi-lingual, Lev studied oriental languages to learn Turkish and Arabic, and realized there was an academic and intellectual interest in the East. He converted to Islam, adopting the name of Essad Bey and the persona of an Ottoman noble in a turban. In 1929 he became the author of international bestsellers.
In a flamboyant world of late 20’s cafes and cabarets, Lev fit in with fellow poets, philosophers and journalists, writing for the top literary journal. He was a Weimar media star, although his background as a Ukrainian Jew was an open secret and criticized in right wing German journals. Islamic groups also denounced his work as inauthentic and anti-Muslim. Officers in the German army deplored descriptions of the 1918 siege of Baku, but reviewers in Europe raved. In 1930, as Nazis reached for power in the Reichstag, German communists attacked his unflattering portraits of revolution.
Weimar era Zionists and orientalists embraced the Muslim near east as a panacea for the steadily growing intolerance of nationalism after the Enlightenment. From the politician Disraeli to philosopher Martin Buber, it was fashionable for prominent Jewish intellectuals to appreciate Islamic culture and history as a Romantic shared heritage, an antidote to the demeaning stereotypes of ghetto and shtetl. Moorish Spain and Maimonides were exemplar of an earlier symbiosis. Lev knew the East far better than the Jewish diaspora did and he was uncompromised by the taint of Christian colonialism.
Zionism countered charges of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew made by nativists who argued only attachment to ancestral land, not cultural assimilation, was a claim to nationality. Nazis echoed this in their slogan ‘Blood and Soil�. In 1931 Lev began to write anti-Bolshevik articles that brought him close with White Russians and Nazis, but scrutiny of his Jewish ancestry ended the association. The summer of 1932 saw daily gun battles between Nazis and Communists on the streets of Berlin. After a blitzkrieg political campaign, Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and absolute dictator in 1934.
At the end of 1932 Lev was lecturing in Vienna when he heard of the alarming political events happening in Berlin and didn’t return home. His father, newlywed wife and her parents joined him in Austria. Revolutions had followed him from Baku to Berlin. In the fall of 1933 Lev and his in-laws traveled to New York with intentions to immigrate, and lived in a three story penthouse on 5th Ave. His father-in-law was ostentatiously rich but the city and marriage soon grated on him. He wrote articles that the Nazis had saved Europe from Bolshevism. It was not an uncommon opinion at the time.
In exile Lev was friends with American literary sympathizers of Hitler, George Viereck and Ezra Pound, and Pima Andreae, a Mussolini era socialite fascist from Italy. He was divorced from Erika in 1935 and returned to Vienna after she and his friend had a high profile tryst all over Europe. Now banned by the Third Reich, Lev adopted the pseudonym Kurban Said to publish in Germany; switching to fiction he wrote ‘Ali and Nino� in 1936. Reiss meets with Baroness Elfriede’s heir, her lawyers and a publisher, to unravel a 1937 contract claiming Said was Elfriede’s pen name, a dodge to throw off censors.
After the Austrian Anschluss of 1938, Lev saw his colleagues scatter throughout the world. He escaped in the spring, once again leaving his father behind, for Italy. He had wanted to write a biography of Mussolini, who claimed to be a defender against Hitler, but was rejected under Nazi urging. He landed in Positano on the Amalfi coast, posing as American. Broke and unable to publish, he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease in 1939 and died in 1942 after a long painful illness. Italians were helpful but encouraged by the Axis alliance persecuted Jews. As said ‘May you live in interesting times�.
As Essad Bey Lev published biographies of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Muhammed and Reza Shah in the 1930’s. He became a monarchist following the Bolshevik revolution. Regarded as unreliable by historians, his memoirs and confabulations still bear reading today. This book was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006 and ‘The Black Count� (of Montecristo) won the 2013 Pulitzer biography prize. Son of a French noble and Haitian slave, Montechristo fought in the French Revolution and campaigned with Napoleon in Egypt. His son Alexandre Dumas wrote the novel of the same name.
Lev was born in 1905 onboard a train from Kiev to Baku. His mother was a radical Bolshevik, his father a rich oil baron in Azerbaijan, then part of imperial Russia. 1905 was a year of political upheavals after a massacre of demonstrators in St. Petersburg sparked revolts across the empire. The rebellions were followed by Tsarist pograms, killing thousands of Jews in the Ukraine. Reiss begins in 1795 when Catherine the Great annexed Poland, acquiring a large Jewish population Russia didn’t have. Fearing foreign influence, the Pale of Settlement limited Jews migration through the empire.
Baku was far more culturally diverse, with a long history of Jewish, Christian and Muslim people intermingling. Reiss uses historical background to explore the world of Lev. By 1813 Russia had wrested the Caucasus from Iran and the region became European. Oil was so plentiful it floated on the sea and burst into flame in the hills inspiring Zoroaster. In the 1850’s its value was recognized, the Nobel brothers and Rothchilds arriving soon after. In 1861 Alexander II freed the serfs and enacted legal and educational reforms that permitted Jews to enroll in St. Petersburg universities.
Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by terrorists seeking to overthrow the throne and was succeeded by Alexander III, a strict authoritarian who repealed his father’s reforms. He died in 1894 and Nicholas II became the last Tsar. By 1901 Baku supplied half the world’s oil. The 1905 revolts engulfed the city in gangs, revolutionaries and Cossack soldiers. Lev’s mother secretly funded Stalin before she killed herself in 1911. He grew up in a sheltered house, only allowed outside with a retinue of retainers, and schooled at home in a large library, dreaming of the city’s palaces from his rooftop vista.
A descendant of Ashkenazi from Ukraine, Lev was enthralled with tribes of Jews and Muslims who lived in the mountains and desert for millennia. Facts were mixed with fiction as he fancied his father a fierce Muslim noble and a protector of the locals. The years leading up to WWI returned to stability but Russian defeats by the Kaiser in 1914 once again ignited revolts from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. In 1918 a civil war raged between the Red and White armies. Stalin had become Lenin’s leader in the Caucasus. Bolsheviks invaded as Lev hid in the basement with his father. They fled east from Baku.
As told in Lev’s 1929 book ‘Blood and Oil in the Orient�, they traversed Turkistan and Persia, witnessing war between the British, Russians and Turks. From Turkmenbashi across the Caspian Sea, where Bolshevik commissars were executed, they traveled by caravan to Bukhara over the desert, where captured German soldiers fought against Uzbek rebels. On their way back to Baku, Lev experienced Persian culture and religion, Shiites and Sufis, bandits, beggars and bazaars. Azerbaijan had been liberated from Bolsheviks by a coalition of Germans and Turks while the Tsar’s family was executed.
By the end of 1918 the Central Powers sued for peace and the British occupied Baku. After the 1919 Paris Peace Conference the Allied Powers pulled up stakes and left Azerbaijan to fend for itself. Within a year the Bolsheviks returned and ended the fledgling democracy. Lev’s father was forced to supply oil to Russia and Stalin became their unwanted house guest. The Bolsheviks declared a week of plunder as the proletariat cleaned out mansions and evicted families. They separated, planning to meet in Georgia and sail west on the Black Sea. Lev traveled alone over the Caucasus mountains at age 14.
Reunited with his father in 1920 on the border of Armenia and Georgia they left for Tbilisi. Lev found an eclectic mix of Kurds, Iranians, Russians, Arabs and Turks. Christian in the 4th century, crusader knights joined them from Jerusalem in the 14th. The mountains were populated with lost tribes and ancient nobility. Ottoman expansion during the 16th century converted many to Islam. The city was overcrowded with Russians headed to Batumi, a port on the Black Sea. They escaped by steamship to Istanbul, then occupied by the British, French and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Lev saw Istanbul as a giant analog of Baku; a cosmopolitan amalgam of east meets west, tolerant of diversity, sublimely historical. It was in decline in 1921, with Ataturk in rebellion against the Sultanate and Allies. Attempts to restore Hagia Sophia to Christianity fueled pan-Islamic and anti-British movements. By 1924 the Caliphate was abolished and the royal family exiled. Reiss uses an unpublished autobiography found in Vienna to track Lev’s odyssey through Italy, France and Germany. As he departed by ship on the Adriatic he was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the old world of the Orient.
Collapse of the Romanov, Ottoman and Hapsburg empires would unleash a cycle of genocide among the new European nations. Many Jews and minority ethnic groups mourned the loss of emperors who had maintained a modicum of safety and civilization. Jews and Gypsies were among a few groups that could not claim ancestral lands in Europe. Lev adopted a new persona, a partly Ottoman or Persian prince rather than a stateless refugee. In Rome he recognized a new threat in fascism, the right wing reaction to communism. Paris was a favored destination for Russians fleeing the revolution.
In 1921 Lev was of age to attend university. He and his father left Paris to go to Germany. Reiss describes the implosion of the Second Reich three years earlier. Leftist revolutions had brewed in Berlin, from a mutinous navy to rival red gangs battling in the streets. Ex-military formed militias to fight them, marching east to join the White Army’s war with the Bolsheviks. Lenin formed his Red Army of 80,000 to seize German industry; proto-Nazi veterans of Verdun crushed the operation. The government was stuck in the middle between radical groups, as father and son crossed over from France.
Holdings of Baku oil magnates collapsed in 1922 as markets realized the Bolsheviks were there to stay. Nearly broke, they joined thousands of Russian emigrés in Berlin where living costs were cheap. In prewar years Germany had grown to be the 2nd largest economy after the US, Berlin a mix of grand neoclassical buildings and barrack style housing for millions of new residents. The postwar Weimar Republic attracted the world’s most creative artists, writers, musicians, scientists. Lev was schooled with the families of Pasternak, Chagall and Nabokov. Along with new immigrants came antisemitism.
‘The Protocols of Zion�, 1903 Tsarist police propaganda, was printed in German after 1920, claiming an international conspiracy of Jewish capitalists, or incongruently socialists. It inflamed old prejudices; liberal and Jewish politicians were assassinated by the hundreds. Already multi-lingual, Lev studied oriental languages to learn Turkish and Arabic, and realized there was an academic and intellectual interest in the East. He converted to Islam, adopting the name of Essad Bey and the persona of an Ottoman noble in a turban. In 1929 he became the author of international bestsellers.
In a flamboyant world of late 20’s cafes and cabarets, Lev fit in with fellow poets, philosophers and journalists, writing for the top literary journal. He was a Weimar media star, although his background as a Ukrainian Jew was an open secret and criticized in right wing German journals. Islamic groups also denounced his work as inauthentic and anti-Muslim. Officers in the German army deplored descriptions of the 1918 siege of Baku, but reviewers in Europe raved. In 1930, as Nazis reached for power in the Reichstag, German communists attacked his unflattering portraits of revolution.
Weimar era Zionists and orientalists embraced the Muslim near east as a panacea for the steadily growing intolerance of nationalism after the Enlightenment. From the politician Disraeli to philosopher Martin Buber, it was fashionable for prominent Jewish intellectuals to appreciate Islamic culture and history as a Romantic shared heritage, an antidote to the demeaning stereotypes of ghetto and shtetl. Moorish Spain and Maimonides were exemplar of an earlier symbiosis. Lev knew the East far better than the Jewish diaspora did and he was uncompromised by the taint of Christian colonialism.
Zionism countered charges of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew made by nativists who argued only attachment to ancestral land, not cultural assimilation, was a claim to nationality. Nazis echoed this in their slogan ‘Blood and Soil�. In 1931 Lev began to write anti-Bolshevik articles that brought him close with White Russians and Nazis, but scrutiny of his Jewish ancestry ended the association. The summer of 1932 saw daily gun battles between Nazis and Communists on the streets of Berlin. After a blitzkrieg political campaign, Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and absolute dictator in 1934.
At the end of 1932 Lev was lecturing in Vienna when he heard of the alarming political events happening in Berlin and didn’t return home. His father, newlywed wife and her parents joined him in Austria. Revolutions had followed him from Baku to Berlin. In the fall of 1933 Lev and his in-laws traveled to New York with intentions to immigrate, and lived in a three story penthouse on 5th Ave. His father-in-law was ostentatiously rich but the city and marriage soon grated on him. He wrote articles that the Nazis had saved Europe from Bolshevism. It was not an uncommon opinion at the time.
In exile Lev was friends with American literary sympathizers of Hitler, George Viereck and Ezra Pound, and Pima Andreae, a Mussolini era socialite fascist from Italy. He was divorced from Erika in 1935 and returned to Vienna after she and his friend had a high profile tryst all over Europe. Now banned by the Third Reich, Lev adopted the pseudonym Kurban Said to publish in Germany; switching to fiction he wrote ‘Ali and Nino� in 1936. Reiss meets with Baroness Elfriede’s heir, her lawyers and a publisher, to unravel a 1937 contract claiming Said was Elfriede’s pen name, a dodge to throw off censors.
After the Austrian Anschluss of 1938, Lev saw his colleagues scatter throughout the world. He escaped in the spring, once again leaving his father behind, for Italy. He had wanted to write a biography of Mussolini, who claimed to be a defender against Hitler, but was rejected under Nazi urging. He landed in Positano on the Amalfi coast, posing as American. Broke and unable to publish, he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease in 1939 and died in 1942 after a long painful illness. Italians were helpful but encouraged by the Axis alliance persecuted Jews. As said ‘May you live in interesting times�.
As Essad Bey Lev published biographies of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Muhammed and Reza Shah in the 1930’s. He became a monarchist following the Bolshevik revolution. Regarded as unreliable by historians, his memoirs and confabulations still bear reading today. This book was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006 and ‘The Black Count� (of Montecristo) won the 2013 Pulitzer biography prize. Son of a French noble and Haitian slave, Montechristo fought in the French Revolution and campaigned with Napoleon in Egypt. His son Alexandre Dumas wrote the novel of the same name.
November 11, 2019
It is hard to fathom that 2019 is winding down. For the last two months I am focusing on books that have been on my to read pile for the longest and books by authors that I have previously read and enjoyed. Reading mainly nonfiction has been enlightening even if I didn’t stick to my original plan to read twenty Pulitzer winners. One Pulitzer winner I did read back in January was The Black Count about the real life inspiration for the Count of Monte Cristo. Needing a fast paced adventure to pique my interest now that the days have gotten shorter, I returned to Tom Reiss and his earlier work The Orientalist. In another real life adventure that spanned three continents, I knew that I would be in for a whirlwind ride.
Ali and Nino: A Love Story is undoubtedly the most famous novel to come from the nation of Azerbaijan. The book’s author is known only as Kurban Said, but Tom Reiss, as well as other literary critics of the twentieth century wanted to know who Kurban Said was. After much research, Reiss determined that Said was most likely a writer named Essad Bey, who was really a Azeri writer named Lev Nussimbaum. Yet, who was this Essad Bey/Lev Nussimbaum character? Was he a pen name so the actual author could get published or an actual writer? The identity of Kurban Said has puzzled the critics for decades, and Reiss was determined to be the one who found out the layers and facets to Kurban Said’s origin.
Lev Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution when the territory still belonged to Russia. His mother was a revolutionary who saw that things were not going so well for the Reds, at least at first, so she killed herself, leaving Lev to be raised by his father Avraham Nussimbaum, a millionaire oil magnate. Baku had been the center of the oil trade for two thousand years and had attracted Jewish refugees from across the diaspora since the fall of the second temple in 70 C.E. With a strategic location on the routes to India and it’s proximity to Persia and the Middle East, world powers realized that if they gained control of Azerbaijan, they could conceivably control the world. Until 1917, life was good for Jews in Azerbaijan, so Avraham chose to stay in Baku and enjoy life as an oilman. Once the Stalinist takeover was complete, effectively banning religion across the Soviet Union, Avraham knew that he and Lev, age twelve, would have to leave their adopted nation behind, so they fled Azerbaijan for good.
Eventually the Nussimbaums would reach England, and Avraham needed to find a gymnasium for Lev to complete his schooling. At age fifteen, he was already more worldly than most of his peers, and this task was more difficult than Avraham had foreseen. Eventually, the father and son settled in Berlin, which in the interwar years was a sanctuary city for Jews fleeing Russia. Lev enrolled in a night high school for Russian émigrés but felt uncomfortable. Coming from an Oriental background with a swarthy complexion, Lev did not fit in with Ashkenazic Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement. As a teenager, Lev already showed a propensity for writing novels and biographies and enrolled at a college during the day while finishing high school at night. Reiss notes of the political situation in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, and suggests that as the climate grew worse for Jews, Lev would have to reinvent himself if he stood a chance to get published. As an Orientalist, Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey, used this name for his publications, and officially converted to Islam.
Lev Nussimbaum only lived to be thirty six, but he was an old thirty six. He died in 1942 in Positano, Italy. In the 1930s, Lev and Nussimbaum relocated to Vienna before the Anschluss, Lev married his former secretary Ericka, the daughter of a shoe magnate, and the small immediate family relocated to New York. Ericka’s father sensed that Europe was about to become a powder keg and enjoyed life in America, and the family easily adapted to life on 5th Avenue. All but Lev/Essad Bey. He pined for his contacts in Europe as he believed that being based there was best for remaining a relevant author, so he divorced Ericka and returned to Vienna. Returning to a country where his life was in danger puzzled all his friends and acquaintances as well as the author. If Kurban Said was really Lev Nussimbaum, then why would he return to a country where being a Jew was grounds for being killed. Reiss dug through mounds of correspondence to find the answer to this puzzle, yet it became irrelevant when Lev moved to the Amalfi Coast of Italy for the final years of his life. Swarthy in complexion and Oriental in appearance, Lev was spared from deportation, even after Italy entered into an alliance with Germany. Living as Essad Bey would save his life for the time being.
The journey of Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey/ Kurban Said was a compelling story. It took me on an adventure over three continents and rivaled Indiana Jones and Lawrence of Arabia for thrills. The only difference is that Nussimbaum’s story was real, and Reiss tells the story of a writer and the nexus of religion and race during the interwar years to paint a picture of the political and cultural climate for non Aryan people during the early 1930s. I found Nussimbaum’s story to be compelling and finished it in a little over a day. I know that Reiss� writing gets better because he would go on to win a Pulitzer for his next book, The Black Count, another true to life adventure story. With the days getting shorter and sunlight at a premium, I need fast paced stories to hold my interest. The Orientalist fit the bill nicely.
4 stars
Ali and Nino: A Love Story is undoubtedly the most famous novel to come from the nation of Azerbaijan. The book’s author is known only as Kurban Said, but Tom Reiss, as well as other literary critics of the twentieth century wanted to know who Kurban Said was. After much research, Reiss determined that Said was most likely a writer named Essad Bey, who was really a Azeri writer named Lev Nussimbaum. Yet, who was this Essad Bey/Lev Nussimbaum character? Was he a pen name so the actual author could get published or an actual writer? The identity of Kurban Said has puzzled the critics for decades, and Reiss was determined to be the one who found out the layers and facets to Kurban Said’s origin.
Lev Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution when the territory still belonged to Russia. His mother was a revolutionary who saw that things were not going so well for the Reds, at least at first, so she killed herself, leaving Lev to be raised by his father Avraham Nussimbaum, a millionaire oil magnate. Baku had been the center of the oil trade for two thousand years and had attracted Jewish refugees from across the diaspora since the fall of the second temple in 70 C.E. With a strategic location on the routes to India and it’s proximity to Persia and the Middle East, world powers realized that if they gained control of Azerbaijan, they could conceivably control the world. Until 1917, life was good for Jews in Azerbaijan, so Avraham chose to stay in Baku and enjoy life as an oilman. Once the Stalinist takeover was complete, effectively banning religion across the Soviet Union, Avraham knew that he and Lev, age twelve, would have to leave their adopted nation behind, so they fled Azerbaijan for good.
Eventually the Nussimbaums would reach England, and Avraham needed to find a gymnasium for Lev to complete his schooling. At age fifteen, he was already more worldly than most of his peers, and this task was more difficult than Avraham had foreseen. Eventually, the father and son settled in Berlin, which in the interwar years was a sanctuary city for Jews fleeing Russia. Lev enrolled in a night high school for Russian émigrés but felt uncomfortable. Coming from an Oriental background with a swarthy complexion, Lev did not fit in with Ashkenazic Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement. As a teenager, Lev already showed a propensity for writing novels and biographies and enrolled at a college during the day while finishing high school at night. Reiss notes of the political situation in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, and suggests that as the climate grew worse for Jews, Lev would have to reinvent himself if he stood a chance to get published. As an Orientalist, Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey, used this name for his publications, and officially converted to Islam.
Lev Nussimbaum only lived to be thirty six, but he was an old thirty six. He died in 1942 in Positano, Italy. In the 1930s, Lev and Nussimbaum relocated to Vienna before the Anschluss, Lev married his former secretary Ericka, the daughter of a shoe magnate, and the small immediate family relocated to New York. Ericka’s father sensed that Europe was about to become a powder keg and enjoyed life in America, and the family easily adapted to life on 5th Avenue. All but Lev/Essad Bey. He pined for his contacts in Europe as he believed that being based there was best for remaining a relevant author, so he divorced Ericka and returned to Vienna. Returning to a country where his life was in danger puzzled all his friends and acquaintances as well as the author. If Kurban Said was really Lev Nussimbaum, then why would he return to a country where being a Jew was grounds for being killed. Reiss dug through mounds of correspondence to find the answer to this puzzle, yet it became irrelevant when Lev moved to the Amalfi Coast of Italy for the final years of his life. Swarthy in complexion and Oriental in appearance, Lev was spared from deportation, even after Italy entered into an alliance with Germany. Living as Essad Bey would save his life for the time being.
The journey of Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey/ Kurban Said was a compelling story. It took me on an adventure over three continents and rivaled Indiana Jones and Lawrence of Arabia for thrills. The only difference is that Nussimbaum’s story was real, and Reiss tells the story of a writer and the nexus of religion and race during the interwar years to paint a picture of the political and cultural climate for non Aryan people during the early 1930s. I found Nussimbaum’s story to be compelling and finished it in a little over a day. I know that Reiss� writing gets better because he would go on to win a Pulitzer for his next book, The Black Count, another true to life adventure story. With the days getting shorter and sunlight at a premium, I need fast paced stories to hold my interest. The Orientalist fit the bill nicely.
4 stars
February 4, 2015
Tom Reiss tells a fascinating story of his search for the elusive author Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey/Kurban Said. Nussimbaum, a famous writer (“Ali and Nino�) during the 20’s and 30’s, was a Jewish writer who converted to Islam and spent much of his life in Berlin during the formative Nazi years. His life was one of reinventing himself, either out of some yearning for a simpler pre-revolutionary time or for self-preservation.
He grew up in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan. His mother was a Russian revolutionary and his father was an oil magnate. Some of Lev’s first memories are of being heavily guarded and protected; members of the Baku rich and their families were constantly being threatened with kidnapping and being ransomed off. In pre –World War I Baku, Josef Stalin was in the business of extorting local ethnic groups to raise money for the Bolsheviks; this was before he became a mass murderer.
Lev and his father (his mother comitted suicide by swallowing acid) had to flee the Red Army (twice). This brought them into contact with camel caravans, Central Asian despots, the Communist Secret Police, Muslim sultans, and local warlords. Throughout Lev’s journey, Reiss weaves in local history, personalities and color to great effect. He explores the Ottoman Empire, Fascism, post WWI Berlin, and the life of the Russian émigré.
Although, ultimately a sad tale, it’s a rewarding one for any history buff who wants a decent encapsulation of some of the major events in early 20th century European and Central Asian history or anyone who’s interested in good biography of an elusive figure in 1920s � 1930’s literature.
He grew up in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan. His mother was a Russian revolutionary and his father was an oil magnate. Some of Lev’s first memories are of being heavily guarded and protected; members of the Baku rich and their families were constantly being threatened with kidnapping and being ransomed off. In pre –World War I Baku, Josef Stalin was in the business of extorting local ethnic groups to raise money for the Bolsheviks; this was before he became a mass murderer.
Lev and his father (his mother comitted suicide by swallowing acid) had to flee the Red Army (twice). This brought them into contact with camel caravans, Central Asian despots, the Communist Secret Police, Muslim sultans, and local warlords. Throughout Lev’s journey, Reiss weaves in local history, personalities and color to great effect. He explores the Ottoman Empire, Fascism, post WWI Berlin, and the life of the Russian émigré.
Although, ultimately a sad tale, it’s a rewarding one for any history buff who wants a decent encapsulation of some of the major events in early 20th century European and Central Asian history or anyone who’s interested in good biography of an elusive figure in 1920s � 1930’s literature.
February 27, 2018
Tom Reiss is taking you on a true tour de force trough Caucasus, Russia and Germany during the first 3 decades of the 20th century.
Not alone are we given a rare insight into the first stages of what would, for good or bad, become the Soviet Union, but also glimpses of the various political and religious societies that played each their part - on both sides - of the Bolshevik revolution.
As history is repeating in Germany and in Italy, by choice or by accident, Lev Nussimbaum happens to turn up everywhere a revolution is in its making.
Lev Nussimbaum was deconstructing himself throughout his life, Tom Reiss is putting him together and presenting him in a political, historical and literary context that it must have taken an enormous effort to achieve.
The only question left is what an Orientalist really is. At the time of Lev Nussimbaum, orientalism was "the new black" with so many fractions each representing their own schools of thought and each having their own political agenda.
A truly enjoyable read, not least if you take an interest in the Orient - whatever that be.
Not alone are we given a rare insight into the first stages of what would, for good or bad, become the Soviet Union, but also glimpses of the various political and religious societies that played each their part - on both sides - of the Bolshevik revolution.
As history is repeating in Germany and in Italy, by choice or by accident, Lev Nussimbaum happens to turn up everywhere a revolution is in its making.
Lev Nussimbaum was deconstructing himself throughout his life, Tom Reiss is putting him together and presenting him in a political, historical and literary context that it must have taken an enormous effort to achieve.
The only question left is what an Orientalist really is. At the time of Lev Nussimbaum, orientalism was "the new black" with so many fractions each representing their own schools of thought and each having their own political agenda.
A truly enjoyable read, not least if you take an interest in the Orient - whatever that be.
November 17, 2021
Jewish Chameleon Pens Azeri Love Story and Vanishes
Let’s have a film fade out here and emerge fifty years ago in 1971. (The much younger) Bob Newman is reading a love story that takes place in the Caucasus around the turn of the 20th century. It’s an engrossing read and he (Bob, that is) feels pleasure thinking that he was able to find a novel from Azerbaijan, one that nobody else around him had ever mentioned. In fact, he never hears another word about Kurban Said, the author of “Ali and Nino�.
Now let’s fast forward to 2005 or 2006. Suddenly Bob reads a review of this book, “The Orientalist� and realizes that whoa!, that’s about the author of the book he read 35 years before. And hey!, it’s a shock to learn that “Kurban Said� was actually a Jewish guy named Lev Nussimbaum who lived most of his life in Europe. It took Bob a while, but well, that’s his turtle-like m.o. He finally got hold of the book and read it now, in 2021.
THE ORIENTALIST is a fantastic tale of a very interesting, if slightly unbelievable, character. The author of the biography did a great deal of research, digging up just about everyone and anyone who, still alive in the 1990s, had known Nussimbaum or those who’d known him. He combed obscure archives for the slightest bits of material. You see, Nussimbaum died in Positano, Italy in 1942. He was born in 1905 in Baku—then Russia—now Azerbaijan, the original petroleum capital of the world. His father was an oil millionaire, his mother a leftwing revolutionary who killed herself when Nussimbaum was young. Other than that, very few people, before this book got published, knew much about the “Jewish chameleon� who at times seemed to be Russian Jewish, at times, Muslim Azerbaijani or Turkish, Persian, or German. He had several aliases, many passports or identity papers, and moved about Europe, Central Asia, and America for most of his short life of 37 years. He escaped the murderous Bolsheviks with his father by sailing across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, then traveling by camel caravan to Bukhara, from there back to Persia. They crossed into Azerbaijan once more in the short period when the three Transcaucasian countries “enjoyed� independence, then fled to Georgia and hence by ship to Istanbul. Eventually the youthful Nussimbaum spent some time at a strange German school on an island off the coast.
In Berlin, he finished high school while simultaneously enrolled in a school of Oriental Studies. He became a writer, though the transition is not well-described in the book, so that the reader wonders how he jumped from “student� to “writer�. This seemed one of the weaknesses of the book. The chaotic German revolution and economic collapse are covered very well, as is the picture of the Caucasus in 1917-1921. These are some of the most interesting and well-written parts of the book.
As a Jewish refugee of uncertain status in a country of rising anti-Semitism and ultimately Nazism, Nussimbaum had to be quick, brave, and sly to stay one step ahead of the bureaucracy. How he did so is what you will learn by reading the book, as well as what he wrote, his rather weird marriage, his trip to America, and his lifelong hatred of Communism. Nussimbaum embraced a highly romantic Orientalism (nothing to do with Edward Said), converted to Islam, changed his name, and believed in the melding of the Jews with other Asiatic peoples due to his idealized vision of a pre-1917 Caucasus. I’ve only scratched the surface here. After he died, several other people claimed to be Kurban Said, and said they’d written “Ali and Nino�. The Azerbaijanis apparently had taken it as their national novel. Tom Reiss� task was to separate fact from fiction.
The thing is that it was extremely difficult to get to the bottom of a lot of Nussimbaum’s life. He definitely made up a lot of stuff, claimed to have been many places where he could not have been, to have fought when he was just a kid, etc. Reiss had to fill in many gaps. Is that biography or fiction? Sometimes I felt it was the latter. Plus I ran into some passages like “territories like Turkestan were sparsely populated badlands whose inhabitants were either nomadic hunters or primitive farmers�.� (p.54) Maybe he meant Turkmenistan, but there the people were mainly herders. Turkestan had been the home of elaborate civilizations for a couple of millennia. And again, on page 106 he blithely says that the Japanese joined the anti-German/Turkish coalition at the end of WW I. This is completely untrue. Japan joined in the second month of the four year war. And probably a careless phrase on p.109 about Young Turk leaders escaping to Berlin on German torpedo boats. So, you know, I had a few doubts about accuracy here. However, as a biography of a very interesting and little-known person, THE ORIENTALIST is well-worth reading.
Let’s have a film fade out here and emerge fifty years ago in 1971. (The much younger) Bob Newman is reading a love story that takes place in the Caucasus around the turn of the 20th century. It’s an engrossing read and he (Bob, that is) feels pleasure thinking that he was able to find a novel from Azerbaijan, one that nobody else around him had ever mentioned. In fact, he never hears another word about Kurban Said, the author of “Ali and Nino�.
Now let’s fast forward to 2005 or 2006. Suddenly Bob reads a review of this book, “The Orientalist� and realizes that whoa!, that’s about the author of the book he read 35 years before. And hey!, it’s a shock to learn that “Kurban Said� was actually a Jewish guy named Lev Nussimbaum who lived most of his life in Europe. It took Bob a while, but well, that’s his turtle-like m.o. He finally got hold of the book and read it now, in 2021.
THE ORIENTALIST is a fantastic tale of a very interesting, if slightly unbelievable, character. The author of the biography did a great deal of research, digging up just about everyone and anyone who, still alive in the 1990s, had known Nussimbaum or those who’d known him. He combed obscure archives for the slightest bits of material. You see, Nussimbaum died in Positano, Italy in 1942. He was born in 1905 in Baku—then Russia—now Azerbaijan, the original petroleum capital of the world. His father was an oil millionaire, his mother a leftwing revolutionary who killed herself when Nussimbaum was young. Other than that, very few people, before this book got published, knew much about the “Jewish chameleon� who at times seemed to be Russian Jewish, at times, Muslim Azerbaijani or Turkish, Persian, or German. He had several aliases, many passports or identity papers, and moved about Europe, Central Asia, and America for most of his short life of 37 years. He escaped the murderous Bolsheviks with his father by sailing across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, then traveling by camel caravan to Bukhara, from there back to Persia. They crossed into Azerbaijan once more in the short period when the three Transcaucasian countries “enjoyed� independence, then fled to Georgia and hence by ship to Istanbul. Eventually the youthful Nussimbaum spent some time at a strange German school on an island off the coast.
In Berlin, he finished high school while simultaneously enrolled in a school of Oriental Studies. He became a writer, though the transition is not well-described in the book, so that the reader wonders how he jumped from “student� to “writer�. This seemed one of the weaknesses of the book. The chaotic German revolution and economic collapse are covered very well, as is the picture of the Caucasus in 1917-1921. These are some of the most interesting and well-written parts of the book.
As a Jewish refugee of uncertain status in a country of rising anti-Semitism and ultimately Nazism, Nussimbaum had to be quick, brave, and sly to stay one step ahead of the bureaucracy. How he did so is what you will learn by reading the book, as well as what he wrote, his rather weird marriage, his trip to America, and his lifelong hatred of Communism. Nussimbaum embraced a highly romantic Orientalism (nothing to do with Edward Said), converted to Islam, changed his name, and believed in the melding of the Jews with other Asiatic peoples due to his idealized vision of a pre-1917 Caucasus. I’ve only scratched the surface here. After he died, several other people claimed to be Kurban Said, and said they’d written “Ali and Nino�. The Azerbaijanis apparently had taken it as their national novel. Tom Reiss� task was to separate fact from fiction.
The thing is that it was extremely difficult to get to the bottom of a lot of Nussimbaum’s life. He definitely made up a lot of stuff, claimed to have been many places where he could not have been, to have fought when he was just a kid, etc. Reiss had to fill in many gaps. Is that biography or fiction? Sometimes I felt it was the latter. Plus I ran into some passages like “territories like Turkestan were sparsely populated badlands whose inhabitants were either nomadic hunters or primitive farmers�.� (p.54) Maybe he meant Turkmenistan, but there the people were mainly herders. Turkestan had been the home of elaborate civilizations for a couple of millennia. And again, on page 106 he blithely says that the Japanese joined the anti-German/Turkish coalition at the end of WW I. This is completely untrue. Japan joined in the second month of the four year war. And probably a careless phrase on p.109 about Young Turk leaders escaping to Berlin on German torpedo boats. So, you know, I had a few doubts about accuracy here. However, as a biography of a very interesting and little-known person, THE ORIENTALIST is well-worth reading.
July 7, 2008
I'd give this more than 5 stars if I could. It was so unusual. It is written as a biography, but really more of a history. I learned so much fascinating stuff about Central Asia, about which really very little great material is written these days (Baku, in Azerbaijan, has been an oil boom town from the ancient to the modern world.) It also dealt heavily on the influence of the Bolshevik revolutions on the rest of Europe and how that played into WWII, which was still well done though more well known. It adds such needed complexity to orientalism debates - it is one thing to create and define myths about "the other", but is it any sin to create and re-create a myth about yourself? The history does get a bit heavy in the middle of the book, but it is so worth it. Such great details - Stalin's favourite novel? What about what Lenin was reading? Did you know that Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist as well? Much of the book is centered on the interwar Russian emigre communities in Germany and France that included the families of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov. The first three chapters plus the one on Jewish Orientalism is worth the book. I'd like to hear someone expound on the "clash of civilizations" after reading this.
October 10, 2011
Having recently completed and having given it 5 stars, I wanted to know more about the author. The author Lev Nussimbaum, born a Jew, used the pen name Kurban Said. Actually both this book and were registered under the author Elfriede Ehrenfels in the German Nazi document Deutscher Gesamkatalog for the years 1935-1939! Who was this guy?! Why all the different names? He left Judaism and converted to the Islamic faith. This was not motivated by the persecution of Jews under Hitler. He converted earlier. What motivated him? What life experiences formed him? You get all of this in this biography which is carefully researched by . Basically Lev Nussimbaum continually reinvented himself, even when he was dieing at 36 years of age from Raynaud's disease.
However, this book is more centered on political science than this one man's life. Definitely more than half of this book is about political movements and history. I found the parts about Lev's youth in Baku, Azerbaijan, after the early exploitation of oil, the most colorful and wonderful. I had a harder time following the political topics. The more you know the easier it is to follow such topics. I have alot to learn. This book definitely taught me tons. You learn about how the Russian Revolution played out in the Caucasus, about the growth of fascism and communism and the effects this had on the people living not only in Europe but also Asia and the Near East. I knew little about Jewish Orientalists. Although I have studied the philosopher Buber, he and others like him were hoping that that Zionism would promote the oriental Jewish cause rather than just European Judaic problems. These issues affected who Lev Nussimbaum was as a person. He wrote 14 non-fiction books on political issues, one being a biography about Mussolini. He livesd 1905-1942. Born in Baku to a wealthy oil baron he escaped during the Russian Revolution via boat and camels to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey and Italy. He lived in Germany and Austria. He had to escape again from the claws of Hitler. How? Well most often, by reinventing himself - over and over again! He lived in the thick of the Russian and European turmoil. For this reason history was a real part os what shaped him. To understand him you have to understand the history of his time. A fascinating life! The book never dragged, but at times it was very difficult to follow all the political twists and turns.
I have two complaints. There is no map in the book and SOMETIMES I think Tom Reiss goes too far in trying to pinpoint WHY Lev did what he did. Sometimes a thorough analysis of a painting just goes too far. Let it be. Let the readers draw their own conclusions.
However, this book is more centered on political science than this one man's life. Definitely more than half of this book is about political movements and history. I found the parts about Lev's youth in Baku, Azerbaijan, after the early exploitation of oil, the most colorful and wonderful. I had a harder time following the political topics. The more you know the easier it is to follow such topics. I have alot to learn. This book definitely taught me tons. You learn about how the Russian Revolution played out in the Caucasus, about the growth of fascism and communism and the effects this had on the people living not only in Europe but also Asia and the Near East. I knew little about Jewish Orientalists. Although I have studied the philosopher Buber, he and others like him were hoping that that Zionism would promote the oriental Jewish cause rather than just European Judaic problems. These issues affected who Lev Nussimbaum was as a person. He wrote 14 non-fiction books on political issues, one being a biography about Mussolini. He livesd 1905-1942. Born in Baku to a wealthy oil baron he escaped during the Russian Revolution via boat and camels to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey and Italy. He lived in Germany and Austria. He had to escape again from the claws of Hitler. How? Well most often, by reinventing himself - over and over again! He lived in the thick of the Russian and European turmoil. For this reason history was a real part os what shaped him. To understand him you have to understand the history of his time. A fascinating life! The book never dragged, but at times it was very difficult to follow all the political twists and turns.
I have two complaints. There is no map in the book and SOMETIMES I think Tom Reiss goes too far in trying to pinpoint WHY Lev did what he did. Sometimes a thorough analysis of a painting just goes too far. Let it be. Let the readers draw their own conclusions.
November 25, 2015
Dedication:
For Lolek,
who showed me how to travel,
and Julie,
who keeps me from going too far.
I wish they had met.
Opening: On a cold morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said.
It's hard to warm to the chameleon, Lev, however his times were eye-poppingly interesting/terrifying; he was forever out of the frying-pan and into the fire and it could be this reason that he kept shape-shifying Zelig-style. Re-inventing oneself to survive is one thing, not knowing when to leave off is worrying - he had the personality traits to become a Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Mehmed.
This is an amazing piece of investigative literature by Reiss. Not a book to read at night because of the small font and the print is mid grey on recycled, therefore greyish, paper.
From the Guardian Sept 2011: Recently I read The Orientalist by Tom Reiss, a fascinating account of the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew from Baku who after the Russian revolution escaped via Turkey to Berlin. Semi-safely ensconced in the Weimar capital, he converted to Islam, taking the name "Essad Bey". A career writing bestselling biographies of Stalin and Mohammed followed. His escapades took him as far as Hollywood before he decided to return to Europe at precisely the wrong moment in history. read more of this review here: ...
#79 TBR Busting 2013
February 20, 2020
"The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second one is, nobody knows." Oscar Wilde
Reiss is an indefatigable researcher. That's a virtue and a flaw in his writing. How much back story is good for a story? Mind you, it's all fascinating -- brilliant primers on European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history, and all told with narrative panache -- but there were times when I felt like we were getting deep in historical weeds thick enough to choke the main story of Nussimbaum's life, and at some points I found the transition back rather thin. Listening to audio version, I found it difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with all the sources he draws on, but so interesting that I'd like to get a hard copy and reread many sections. (I hasten to add that narrator of audio was excellent.)
Though Reiss does not do as good a job of selecting and integrating the back ground as he does in , his main story of another figure who was raised up and betrayed by historical forces is every bit as riveting. The account of Lev N's final months are poignant and heartbreaking. I plan on listening to it again with book in hand.
Reiss is an indefatigable researcher. That's a virtue and a flaw in his writing. How much back story is good for a story? Mind you, it's all fascinating -- brilliant primers on European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history, and all told with narrative panache -- but there were times when I felt like we were getting deep in historical weeds thick enough to choke the main story of Nussimbaum's life, and at some points I found the transition back rather thin. Listening to audio version, I found it difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with all the sources he draws on, but so interesting that I'd like to get a hard copy and reread many sections. (I hasten to add that narrator of audio was excellent.)
Though Reiss does not do as good a job of selecting and integrating the back ground as he does in , his main story of another figure who was raised up and betrayed by historical forces is every bit as riveting. The account of Lev N's final months are poignant and heartbreaking. I plan on listening to it again with book in hand.
March 1, 2017
I bought this book because Nicholas Whyte made it sound very interesting, and then I kept it lying about on the Kindle for ages without starting it. When I did, I raced through it. Fascinating, well written book about a very strange person.
One of the things I like about biographies is that people's lives resist periodization and also geography. You get histories of times and places where the times and places are cut neatly along lines, but biography crosses those lines. Lev Nussimbaum, Essan Bey, Kurban Said, did this more than most people. Born on a train in Russia to a Jewish oil millionaire from Baku and a revolutionary mother, in 1905, he fled the Russian revolution and reinvented himself in Germany in the twenties and thirties as a Muslim, and as someone who could explain East to West. It's very interesting to consider how much of it was deception, how much self-deception, and how much playacting -- he'd tell people his father was a Sheik while living in an apartment in Vienna with his actual father.
This is very well written, and weaves in the story of Reiss's quest for Kurban Said remarkably well.
You wouldn't think you want to read this, but actually you should.
One of the things I like about biographies is that people's lives resist periodization and also geography. You get histories of times and places where the times and places are cut neatly along lines, but biography crosses those lines. Lev Nussimbaum, Essan Bey, Kurban Said, did this more than most people. Born on a train in Russia to a Jewish oil millionaire from Baku and a revolutionary mother, in 1905, he fled the Russian revolution and reinvented himself in Germany in the twenties and thirties as a Muslim, and as someone who could explain East to West. It's very interesting to consider how much of it was deception, how much self-deception, and how much playacting -- he'd tell people his father was a Sheik while living in an apartment in Vienna with his actual father.
This is very well written, and weaves in the story of Reiss's quest for Kurban Said remarkably well.
You wouldn't think you want to read this, but actually you should.
February 11, 2016
(Previously read in June, 2009.)
The Second Time Around
I've decided that this year (2016) I'll undertake an experiment, of sorts, to read books which I've rated highly some time back but which I haven't written reviews for or have only a vague memory of to see how they fare "the second time around."
This is not to be confused with my occasional rereading of perennial favorites such as Jane Austen, E.F. Benson, or Arthur Conan Doyle ("comfort reads"). No, I'm genuinely curious to see how the passage of time has affected my reaction to and appreciation for each book.
And so the experiment begins with a book that I recently gave to my nephew for Christmas, confident that he, too, would enjoy it. Only after giving it to him, I realized that while I remembered the general historical period and geographical regions the book covered, one I and my nephew have both studied, that I couldn't actually recall much about the subject of the book himself. And why had I given the book five stars, a rare thing for me?
I have, I realize, become a harsher critic and would probably now give the book four stars, though I have decided to retain the initial rating because, after all, it did impress me enough to warrant it in 2009. For this second reading, I read quite differently than before, though, making "The Orientalist" my "bedside book" which I read for a half hour or so before falling asleep, a more fragmented and incremental reading, both measured and challenging, for it is harder to remember incidents and people spread out over a reading of weeks rather than days.
But this much I can say in any case: the author, Tom Reiss, must have embarked on a truly strange and obsessive journey while researching this book, and while he never permits himself to seize the foreground, I was keenly aware of his reaction to and appraisal of his subject as well as numerous temptations to hare off pursuing other topics.
Thus, the subject of the biography, one Lev Nussimbaum AKA Essad Bey AKA Kurban Said, is at the center of a whirling and ever-changing historical maelstrom. Since Lev/Essad Bey himself is an self-invented fabulist or "story swindler" (in the Nazi's estimation), Reiss' primary challenge was in deciphering where reality left off and fantasy began. It was clearly a daunting if fascinating task.
Reiss firmly embeds Lev in the events of his cultural and political events of his time, providing whatever material the reader needs to understand the central events and players. There are some illuminating chapters or parts of chapters, which depart from Lev altogether to give the reader a bird's-eye view of what happened in the Caucasus in the wake of the Russian Revolution, in Berlin during the 1920s, and in Italy in the 1930s. It's heady stuff, and for an ex-Slavic studies major like myself it covered a lot of familiar territory, but from a new slant: from the perspective of the son of a wealthy Jew, owner of oil wells in Baku.
So much of the material unfolding -- on Stalin, on various Russian religious sects, on White Russian exiles, on the rise of Hitler and the political upheavals in Berlin in the 1920s -- was known to me, but it was interwoven in a way I'd never been exposed to, making entirely new (to me) connections and revealing so many things that I astonished myself by not knowing already. This is a humbling and delightful experience for a reader: to know enough to appreciate the material but to be given new grist for the intellectual mill.
I did not know, for example, that there had been "Jewish" Cossacks (not actually Jews, but observing many Jewish practices, such as keeping Sabbath rules) who rode to the protection of Jews during the pogroms in the Ukraine, and that indeed an entire group of Russian serfs, known as the Subbotniks, had likewise decided to "reject the divinity of Jesus Christ and worship like Jews," petitioning the czar in 1817 to recognize their conversion. The czar, as one can imagine, was furious, for at that very time he was trying to rid his realm of Jews altogether.
That is but one snippet, taken from one page of background on the Caucasus and its mix of religions, but it's a representative one. Reiss ranges so widely and authoritatively that I was repeatedly going back a few pages to make sure I'd absorbed them properly. (This, of course, was also because I was reading the book in smallish chunks right before falling asleep, but suffice it to say that it was less because the material was hard to absorb than that I simply wanted to make sure I could later recall it correctly.)
Indeed, I found myself, over the weeks I read the book, finding excuses to work these treasured tidbits into conversations with my husband and friends. Did you know, for example, that the Nazi chant "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" was the brainchild of a Harvard man who based it on a Harvard football fight chant: "Fight Harvard! Fight! Fight! Fight!"? Hitler, apparently, loved the idea of football chants and immediately saw their appeal in a political context. This same Harvard man, one Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was Hitler's capable publicist in the early days, later served as an adviser to Roosevelt. In fact, I was astonished and rather bemused to find how many American connections there were to both Hitler and Mussolini. In this election year, it was a sobering reminder of how short-sighted contemporary appraisals of rising political figures can be.
(A personal aside: I was chagrined, as always, to find that my husband had a much better recollection of The Orientalist than I had. He also read the book back in 2009. He has always had a much better memory than I have, a vexing characteristic in a spouse.)
But getting back to the central subject of the book, Lev Nussimbaum. He was, in addition to being a gifted storyteller, linguist, and scholar, an extremely secretive and complex character. Reiss' appraisal of Lev unfolds throughout the book, but he begins from the very outset to present Lev as an irresistible mystery: it is as if Lev had in some way foreshadowed his own biographer, leaving a trail of delicious crumbs, just enough to lure the biographer on. Lev's life took so many turns, and along the way he encountered so many fascinating, notable, and infamous people, that I was swept right along.
On this second reading, I was struck forcefully by how Lev's life could well have played out in contemporary times. Or, as Reiss put it in an interview included in an appendix, "In some ways, the world Lev grew up in resembles the one we may be facing now. The global order that had held for many decades was crumbling. Terrorism was a fact of life. " This thought had also occurred to me a number of times as I read the book. "It could happen to us. It could happen to me!"
Lev is an extravagant creature, but he is also a sort of Everyman, dealing with impossible catastrophes with ingenuity. Rather than retreat from threats, Lev simply insists that he is someone else entirely. He is not a Jew from Baku. He is an Oriental prince. And to an amazing extent, the ruse works. How much of the ruse is protective covering and how much Lev actually believes it himself is one of the central questions of the book. He converts to Islam, publishes under the name "Essad Bey," and becomes fluent in Turkish and Arabic. He covers his tracks. Yet everyone seems to know that he is "a Jew from Baku" and not Essad Bey.
For some reason, and this may seem a frivolous comparison, I couldn't help but think of David Bowie, who died while I was reading this book. No one actually believed that Bowie was a spaceman, Ziggy Stardust. Yet it seemed.... almost believable. There was something so alien about Bowie that he could successfully become an alien from outer space. And thus it was with Lev, who seemed to be an Oriental prince down to his very bones, and yet he was, in fact, a Jew from Baku.
In the author's final analysis, Lev "believed he could invent his way in and out of anything." I agree this was the case, but I couldn't help but wonder how much of our lives, in the final reckoning, are just that: inventions we believe in, whole heartedly. Perhaps our self-invented selves are not as exotic as being an Oriental prince, but they are inventions, nonetheless. And this thought, depressing as it may be, made me utterly sympathetic to the strange life and even stranger times of Lev Nussimbaum.
The Second Time Around
I've decided that this year (2016) I'll undertake an experiment, of sorts, to read books which I've rated highly some time back but which I haven't written reviews for or have only a vague memory of to see how they fare "the second time around."
This is not to be confused with my occasional rereading of perennial favorites such as Jane Austen, E.F. Benson, or Arthur Conan Doyle ("comfort reads"). No, I'm genuinely curious to see how the passage of time has affected my reaction to and appreciation for each book.
And so the experiment begins with a book that I recently gave to my nephew for Christmas, confident that he, too, would enjoy it. Only after giving it to him, I realized that while I remembered the general historical period and geographical regions the book covered, one I and my nephew have both studied, that I couldn't actually recall much about the subject of the book himself. And why had I given the book five stars, a rare thing for me?
I have, I realize, become a harsher critic and would probably now give the book four stars, though I have decided to retain the initial rating because, after all, it did impress me enough to warrant it in 2009. For this second reading, I read quite differently than before, though, making "The Orientalist" my "bedside book" which I read for a half hour or so before falling asleep, a more fragmented and incremental reading, both measured and challenging, for it is harder to remember incidents and people spread out over a reading of weeks rather than days.
But this much I can say in any case: the author, Tom Reiss, must have embarked on a truly strange and obsessive journey while researching this book, and while he never permits himself to seize the foreground, I was keenly aware of his reaction to and appraisal of his subject as well as numerous temptations to hare off pursuing other topics.
Thus, the subject of the biography, one Lev Nussimbaum AKA Essad Bey AKA Kurban Said, is at the center of a whirling and ever-changing historical maelstrom. Since Lev/Essad Bey himself is an self-invented fabulist or "story swindler" (in the Nazi's estimation), Reiss' primary challenge was in deciphering where reality left off and fantasy began. It was clearly a daunting if fascinating task.
Reiss firmly embeds Lev in the events of his cultural and political events of his time, providing whatever material the reader needs to understand the central events and players. There are some illuminating chapters or parts of chapters, which depart from Lev altogether to give the reader a bird's-eye view of what happened in the Caucasus in the wake of the Russian Revolution, in Berlin during the 1920s, and in Italy in the 1930s. It's heady stuff, and for an ex-Slavic studies major like myself it covered a lot of familiar territory, but from a new slant: from the perspective of the son of a wealthy Jew, owner of oil wells in Baku.
So much of the material unfolding -- on Stalin, on various Russian religious sects, on White Russian exiles, on the rise of Hitler and the political upheavals in Berlin in the 1920s -- was known to me, but it was interwoven in a way I'd never been exposed to, making entirely new (to me) connections and revealing so many things that I astonished myself by not knowing already. This is a humbling and delightful experience for a reader: to know enough to appreciate the material but to be given new grist for the intellectual mill.
I did not know, for example, that there had been "Jewish" Cossacks (not actually Jews, but observing many Jewish practices, such as keeping Sabbath rules) who rode to the protection of Jews during the pogroms in the Ukraine, and that indeed an entire group of Russian serfs, known as the Subbotniks, had likewise decided to "reject the divinity of Jesus Christ and worship like Jews," petitioning the czar in 1817 to recognize their conversion. The czar, as one can imagine, was furious, for at that very time he was trying to rid his realm of Jews altogether.
That is but one snippet, taken from one page of background on the Caucasus and its mix of religions, but it's a representative one. Reiss ranges so widely and authoritatively that I was repeatedly going back a few pages to make sure I'd absorbed them properly. (This, of course, was also because I was reading the book in smallish chunks right before falling asleep, but suffice it to say that it was less because the material was hard to absorb than that I simply wanted to make sure I could later recall it correctly.)
Indeed, I found myself, over the weeks I read the book, finding excuses to work these treasured tidbits into conversations with my husband and friends. Did you know, for example, that the Nazi chant "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" was the brainchild of a Harvard man who based it on a Harvard football fight chant: "Fight Harvard! Fight! Fight! Fight!"? Hitler, apparently, loved the idea of football chants and immediately saw their appeal in a political context. This same Harvard man, one Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was Hitler's capable publicist in the early days, later served as an adviser to Roosevelt. In fact, I was astonished and rather bemused to find how many American connections there were to both Hitler and Mussolini. In this election year, it was a sobering reminder of how short-sighted contemporary appraisals of rising political figures can be.
(A personal aside: I was chagrined, as always, to find that my husband had a much better recollection of The Orientalist than I had. He also read the book back in 2009. He has always had a much better memory than I have, a vexing characteristic in a spouse.)
But getting back to the central subject of the book, Lev Nussimbaum. He was, in addition to being a gifted storyteller, linguist, and scholar, an extremely secretive and complex character. Reiss' appraisal of Lev unfolds throughout the book, but he begins from the very outset to present Lev as an irresistible mystery: it is as if Lev had in some way foreshadowed his own biographer, leaving a trail of delicious crumbs, just enough to lure the biographer on. Lev's life took so many turns, and along the way he encountered so many fascinating, notable, and infamous people, that I was swept right along.
On this second reading, I was struck forcefully by how Lev's life could well have played out in contemporary times. Or, as Reiss put it in an interview included in an appendix, "In some ways, the world Lev grew up in resembles the one we may be facing now. The global order that had held for many decades was crumbling. Terrorism was a fact of life. " This thought had also occurred to me a number of times as I read the book. "It could happen to us. It could happen to me!"
Lev is an extravagant creature, but he is also a sort of Everyman, dealing with impossible catastrophes with ingenuity. Rather than retreat from threats, Lev simply insists that he is someone else entirely. He is not a Jew from Baku. He is an Oriental prince. And to an amazing extent, the ruse works. How much of the ruse is protective covering and how much Lev actually believes it himself is one of the central questions of the book. He converts to Islam, publishes under the name "Essad Bey," and becomes fluent in Turkish and Arabic. He covers his tracks. Yet everyone seems to know that he is "a Jew from Baku" and not Essad Bey.
For some reason, and this may seem a frivolous comparison, I couldn't help but think of David Bowie, who died while I was reading this book. No one actually believed that Bowie was a spaceman, Ziggy Stardust. Yet it seemed.... almost believable. There was something so alien about Bowie that he could successfully become an alien from outer space. And thus it was with Lev, who seemed to be an Oriental prince down to his very bones, and yet he was, in fact, a Jew from Baku.
In the author's final analysis, Lev "believed he could invent his way in and out of anything." I agree this was the case, but I couldn't help but wonder how much of our lives, in the final reckoning, are just that: inventions we believe in, whole heartedly. Perhaps our self-invented selves are not as exotic as being an Oriental prince, but they are inventions, nonetheless. And this thought, depressing as it may be, made me utterly sympathetic to the strange life and even stranger times of Lev Nussimbaum.
July 20, 2007
One of the most riviting and epic biographies/historical recreations I've encountered.
February 27, 2010
Lev Nussimbaum...upper-middle-class Ukrainian Jewish boy raised in Baku just before the Great War...who reinvents himself as Kurban Said, a Muslim Azeri Turkish princeling, a right-wing journalist in Weimar Germany, society husband, friend of a host of shadowy political and high-society figures, and who ends up in Mussolini's Italy as a pro-Fascist targeted by the Nazis as a Jew...and as the author of "Ali and Nino", a world-famous novel of love and war in the Caucasus, a book regarded as the Azerbaijani national epic. Okay-- do try to keep up.
Lev Nussimbaum, Kurban Said, Essad Bey... all faces of a personality more intriguing than Sir Edmund Backhouse ("The Hermit of Peking") or Lincoln Trebitsch ("The Many Lives of Lincoln Trebitsch"): one of the great imposters of the 20th century. And yet..."imposter" isn't the right word, really. His literary talents are clear, and his constant reinventions are far more than tactical ploys.
Reiss' biography is engrossing, and Nussimbaum/Kurban said is a figure worth considering. Very much a book worth reading some night over Turkish coffee.
Lev Nussimbaum, Kurban Said, Essad Bey... all faces of a personality more intriguing than Sir Edmund Backhouse ("The Hermit of Peking") or Lincoln Trebitsch ("The Many Lives of Lincoln Trebitsch"): one of the great imposters of the 20th century. And yet..."imposter" isn't the right word, really. His literary talents are clear, and his constant reinventions are far more than tactical ploys.
Reiss' biography is engrossing, and Nussimbaum/Kurban said is a figure worth considering. Very much a book worth reading some night over Turkish coffee.
February 9, 2017
"قربان سعيد" الاسم الذي ظهر على غلاف الرواية الشهيرة (علي ونينو)، يجمع كل النقاد على اعتباره اسماً حركياً ويختلفون حول هوية مؤلف الرواية الحقيقي. في هذا الكتاب يتتبع توم ريس الخيوط ليصل الى شخصية الكاتب الحقيقية التي تختبئ خلف ذلك الاسم المستعار. ليف نيوسمباوم ابن رجل يهودي كان من أعمدة الصناعة النفطية في باكو في بدايات القرن العشرين. تقطعت به وبأبيه السبل بعد قيام الثورة البلشفية وما لبث أن أعلن إسلامه لاحقاً ليتحول الى أسعد بيك. سواءٌ أكان استنتاج المؤلف حول العلاقة بين قربان سعيد وأسعد بيك صحيحة أم لا، تبقى هذه الشخصية مثيرة للجدل لما اكتنفها من غموض وما عبرت به من مراحل وتحولات.
يستعرض الكتاب من خلال قصة أسعد بيك الفترة التاريخية الواقعة بين الحربين العالميتين وما تم فيهما من صراع للقوى والأفكار. لكنه أظهر تحيزاً فجاً تجاه القضية اليهودية وكل ما هو يهودي!
في المحصلة الكتاب ممتع وثري ولكنه بحاجة الى قراءة فاحصة تميز الغث من السمين
يستعرض الكتاب من خلال قصة أسعد بيك الفترة التاريخية الواقعة بين الحربين العالميتين وما تم فيهما من صراع للقوى والأفكار. لكنه أظهر تحيزاً فجاً تجاه القضية اليهودية وكل ما هو يهودي!
في المحصلة الكتاب ممتع وثري ولكنه بحاجة الى قراءة فاحصة تميز الغث من السمين
March 15, 2022
This book is an education and review on so many major events surrounding the life of its subject: the Russian Revolution; the German Revolution; Turkey and the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Hitler; Zionism; and Jewish Orientalism. Who knew there was such a concept? Basically Jews who sought a rapprochement with Muslims as fellow Semitic peoples against European discrimination and rejection and thought them worthy of emulation and respect.
Essad Bey could be called the Borat of his time. Prolific does not adequately describe his output. A strange man whose life was filled with an excess of both money and tragedy. His books were as popular as Steinbeck but no one has heard of him. He’s the most famous author of Azerbaijan but his Jewishness is dismissed as a lie. Essad Bey was Kurban Said was Lev Nussinbaum.
Reiss spent years investigating who exactly Essad Bey was and where his path took him. It’s fascinating but also dry at times. Reiss lays it all out there. As a result I’ve got no desire to read Bey’s famous novel, Ali and Nino, written under the nom de plume, Kurban Said, nor his autobiography, Blood and Oil in the Orient, written as Essad Bey. Read enough.
Essad Bey could be called the Borat of his time. Prolific does not adequately describe his output. A strange man whose life was filled with an excess of both money and tragedy. His books were as popular as Steinbeck but no one has heard of him. He’s the most famous author of Azerbaijan but his Jewishness is dismissed as a lie. Essad Bey was Kurban Said was Lev Nussinbaum.
Reiss spent years investigating who exactly Essad Bey was and where his path took him. It’s fascinating but also dry at times. Reiss lays it all out there. As a result I’ve got no desire to read Bey’s famous novel, Ali and Nino, written under the nom de plume, Kurban Said, nor his autobiography, Blood and Oil in the Orient, written as Essad Bey. Read enough.
May 2, 2013
"It’s just an amazing, exhilarating book from which I learned so much, a visceral experience of finding oneself seemingly literally against all the world. The Self triumphant, somehow, in a system that wants to destroy every last trace of it. I can't even express, I don't think, all that is amazing about this book."--Kelly
July 4, 2024
Dosłownie ja
December 17, 2012
Lev Nussimbaum was a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the name of Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution became celebrated throughout fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino—a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust—is still in print today.
But Lev’s life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his real identity—until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck, also a friend of Freud’s and Einstein’s, was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini’s official biographer—until Fascists uncovered his true origins. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book—scrawled in tine print in half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone—helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker magazine, he pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal—and sometimes as heartbreaking—as his subject’s life.
But Lev’s life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his real identity—until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck, also a friend of Freud’s and Einstein’s, was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini’s official biographer—until Fascists uncovered his true origins. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book—scrawled in tine print in half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone—helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker magazine, he pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal—and sometimes as heartbreaking—as his subject’s life.
February 15, 2008
I picked this book up in Newark Airport & read it all during my trip to Portugal. What a find!
Suddenly all the history preceding WWI & II & the creation of Israel was spelled out for me. Fascinating story of solving the mystery of Lev Nussbaum's eclectic life as a Jew, as a Muslim, as a writer...
Just learning that at the turn of the 20th Century, the British proposed moving Jews into Palestine to "stabilize the situation."???!!!! Lord, everything we have been taught to think today about relations between Muslims and Jews is all such recent political doctrine. Reading about the centuries of comradery between these two religions was mindblowing.
The author manages to weave so much very detailed historical record of the Russian Revolution, the late 19th century rise of the concept of Aryanism, the precarious political situation in Germany before the rise of Nazism, the beginning of Stalin's career--all deftly combined with the specifics of Lev's peripatetic journey around Europe and the Caucasus.
Lev's incredible output as a writer is phenomenal. He died in his thirties, but with many novels, stories, biographies under his belt.
I'm about to reread this, as my dad has finally finished it. Yea!
Suddenly all the history preceding WWI & II & the creation of Israel was spelled out for me. Fascinating story of solving the mystery of Lev Nussbaum's eclectic life as a Jew, as a Muslim, as a writer...
Just learning that at the turn of the 20th Century, the British proposed moving Jews into Palestine to "stabilize the situation."???!!!! Lord, everything we have been taught to think today about relations between Muslims and Jews is all such recent political doctrine. Reading about the centuries of comradery between these two religions was mindblowing.
The author manages to weave so much very detailed historical record of the Russian Revolution, the late 19th century rise of the concept of Aryanism, the precarious political situation in Germany before the rise of Nazism, the beginning of Stalin's career--all deftly combined with the specifics of Lev's peripatetic journey around Europe and the Caucasus.
Lev's incredible output as a writer is phenomenal. He died in his thirties, but with many novels, stories, biographies under his belt.
I'm about to reread this, as my dad has finally finished it. Yea!
July 23, 2008
The Orientalist was a fascinating portrait of the son of a Jewish oil millionaire from Azerbaijan, Lev Nussimbaum, who reinvents himself as Essad Bey and becomes a best-selling author. There is interesting consideration of a lost, benevolent form of Orientalism, pan-semitism, the longing some Jews once had to close the gap with their Muslum brethren. Lev/ Essad was witness to the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution, and linked to it via his mysterious, revolutionary mother who killed herself by drinking acid. Lev's story is interspersed with fascinating historical sections that set complex context, the best of which is about the golden age of once-progressive melting pot Azerbaijan. This is also a literary mystery, dicovering whether or not Lev is the real author of the Azerbaijani classic novel Ali & Nino. Ultimately, Lev flees the violence of history only to find himself in Weimer and then Nazi Germany. After that, he applies to be the biographer of Benito Musolini. This is not only a great, bizarre adventure tale, it's a book that explores some of the greatest atrocities, reversals and pogroms of the 20th century. Despite the gravity of that, it is still a fun, very engaging read about a wonderfully eclectic fabulist.
March 22, 2013
It is was revealing to see a book that breaks so many modern days assumptions and shows that there is more than one way of seeing the world and explaining people behaviors.
People in the past had not have had benefits of our knowledge of how historic events have developed, and we cannot judge them based on what we know now.
This book is about a fascinating (stranger than in a novel) life of Jew from Baku who as teenager ran for his life from red army, converted to Islam and pretended to be a Muslim prince, became famous German writer in 30th, married daughter of American tycoon, died before reaching 40 in 1942 in fascist Italy, and under his Muslim name is considered a great national writer in Azerbaijan.
The book is beautifully written and researched and full of unbelievable unique characters like very old Italian baroness who is living alone in old castle and writes Musical for band she met in Berlin. You will also find there many small stories that make unexpected history connections.
Do you know that fascist greeting Hail Hitler was inspired by cheers of Harvard football club?
People in the past had not have had benefits of our knowledge of how historic events have developed, and we cannot judge them based on what we know now.
This book is about a fascinating (stranger than in a novel) life of Jew from Baku who as teenager ran for his life from red army, converted to Islam and pretended to be a Muslim prince, became famous German writer in 30th, married daughter of American tycoon, died before reaching 40 in 1942 in fascist Italy, and under his Muslim name is considered a great national writer in Azerbaijan.
The book is beautifully written and researched and full of unbelievable unique characters like very old Italian baroness who is living alone in old castle and writes Musical for band she met in Berlin. You will also find there many small stories that make unexpected history connections.
Do you know that fascist greeting Hail Hitler was inspired by cheers of Harvard football club?
August 15, 2012
"Who is this Essad Bey?" Trotsky asked in a 1932 letter to his son. By then, this mysterious writer had written bestselling biographies of Mohammed and Stalin, a book on the oil industry in Baku (in the early 20th century the Texas of the Caucasus), and a steady stream of articles on literary and political subjects from Tolstoy and Dreiser to the Ottomans and Americans ("American History in Five Hundred Words").
In one photograph he appears as a sporty figure in a fez; in another he is dressed as mountain warrior with a dagger at his waist. He claimed descent from Muslim princes, but others alleged he was the son of an oil millionaire in Baku, a nationalist poet, or a Viennese writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot.
Not many biographers have to begin their projects by first figuring out the identity of their subjects. But in order to write "The Orientalist," Tom Reiss traveled to 10 countries in search of Essad Bey, aka the bestselling novelist Kurban Said, author of "Ali and Nino," a 20th-century literary classic.
Mr. Reiss's book chronicles the adventures of a biographer, disclosing the process by which he discovered that in fact his subject was Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Baku in 1905, an escapee via camel caravan from his native land, which Stalin (once a guest in Lev's own home) was plundering and devastating. Lev would die of a rare blood disease in 1942 in Italy, two weeks too late to take advantage of doing the radio broadcasts that Ezra Pound had arranged for him.
Lev (as his biographer calls him) yearned for the pre-World War I world. Like Disraeli and a generation of 19th-century Jews, Lev was an orientalist - a mystic, really, who believed in a kind of pan-Semitic peopling of the East. Although Lev assumed the identity of a Muslim - even converting to the religion - and married an American wife without telling her that he was born a Jew, he was something other than an imposter. Among friends, he would even joke about his assumed identity, and anyone who became Lev's friend quickly realized that his father, who lived with Lev, was hardly the Muslim prince Lev claimed as his progenitor.
Lev is best understood as a writer. All else - his marriage, love affairs, politics - was at the service of his imagination. Life for him was something that had to be brought to book. Stalin, in Lev's biography, was not only the monster-totalitarian who destroyed the diverse world of the East and tyrannized his own people, he was also a gangster/bank robber and a friend of his mother, herself a revolutionary who committed suicide after marrying Lev's oil millionaire father.
Or so Lev claimed. Mr. Reiss can sort out the fact from the fancies only up to a point. As he asks when he quotes Trotsky's query: "Was it even clear that Lev knew the answer by this point?"
Lev was a bestselling author in Nazi Germany until Goebbels & Co. discovered his Jewish identity. After 1935, Lev could have stayed in the United States, even though his marriage had broken up, since he would have had no trouble earning his living. He was a prolific author who had already been translated into 17 languages.
But Lev was a monarchist. He had no more faith in the United States than he had in Weimar Germany. Democracy, to him, represented merely a cacophony of political factions. Kings had ruled the world for centuries, and so they should again. Dictators ran a poor second to kings, since they did not, in Lev's view, hold power in trust for the people but only for themselves.
In fascist Europe, where Lev returned to live, he sought protection from those in power. So as late as 1938 he aspired to be Mussolini's authorized biographer. At least Mussolini had shown some respect for the Italian monarchy.
Lev was no Nazi, but like Disraeli he might be called a racialist (Mr. Reiss shows how Disraeli's novels dramatize a sense of Semitic supremacy that made the imaginative world of Essad Bey conceivable). Lev thought of himself as a "Man from the East, a realm of lost glory and mystery. He began to fantasize about a pan-Islamic spirit that would preserve everything from revolutionary upheaval."
Lev carried with him what Mr. Reiss calls a "portable Orient," which Lev would embody for the entertainment of his audiences. He was Zeliglike (Mr. Reiss alludes to Woody Allen's movie) in so far as he seemed to be able to change identities without any sense of inner conflict. In Positano, Lev's final destination, he enjoyed the admiration of a community that did not doubt his identity, finally erecting a gravestone that read "Mohammed Essad Bey."
Mr. Reiss does not provide a scrap of evidence to show that Lev turned Turk because he repudiated his Jewishness. "Figures as diverse as Disraeli and the philosopher Martin Buber played a part in this relocation of the Jewish spirit to the realm of pan-Asia," writes Mr. Reiss.
This is a lost world of the imagination that the biographer recreates with extraordinary aplomb. It appears in all its strangeness and wonder in the midst of the biographer's own tales about his strenuous efforts to find out who Essad Bey and Kurban Said really were.
As a biographer, I especially enjoyed Mr. Reiss's accounts of his efforts to entertain his interviewees. In one case, he had to visit a castle inhabited by a source who was writing lyrics for a musical. The trouble was she had never seen such a production. Had Mr. Reiss seen one? Not in a long time, he replied, but the obliging biographer then performed versions of "Singin' in the Rain" and other classics of the musical stage - all while making his way to a freezing room stuffed with prized documents he could only peruse under natural light. (Ah that's the trouble with those castle assignments, an arduous part of the biographer's task).
For sheer reading pleasure, for insights into the biographer's world, and for the rediscovery of a major literary figure (please, someone, reprint Lev's biography of Stalin!), this book cannot be bettered.
December 15, 2013
A few years ago, I was given the novel by someone working at a client of mine. The book, on an 'impossible' love affair between a muslim boy and a christian girl, set in pre-revolution (that is, pre-Russian revolution) Baku in Azarbaijan, is an amazing masterpiece. The author, then listed as , was a bit of a mystery, as it was quite unclear who the person actually was, the assumption being that he was a Russian Jew, originally from Baku, who had fled from that very revolution, to Germany. Hardly an improvement, at the time, for a jew.
More recently, I read Kurban Said's other novel, , and although this one was less impressive, it still had some very good moments. As 'my' copy of Ali and Nino was published in the 1970s, this book had slightly more info on the author, actually saying that 'Kurban Said' was a pen name.
Reiss, fascinated by the book Ali and Nino, during a trip to the Caucasus a few years ago and a Jew himself, was captivated by the mysteries surrounding the book's author and ended up excavating related information and talking to relevant individuals for several years, before coming up with the definitive answer as to who the man, Kurban Said, Essad Bay, Lev Nussimbaum, was: A jewish refugee from Azarbaijan, who, after a spectacular flight through central Asia, running from the Bolsheviks, returned to Baku, only to leave once more, with his father, for Constantinople and, later, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, briefly staying in the US, to end up in the Italian coastal town of Positano, where he died from a rare and incurable disease.
Nussimbaum's story is certainly tragic but also amazing, reading like an adventure novel itself, in part because of his extreme genius as an author, penning a very wide range of books, including biographies on Stalin, Lenin and Czar Nicholas II as well as others. But also because during his short lifetime, he died in his 30s, he was in contact, or even close friends, with a whole laundry list of important social and historical figures of his age. In fact, Reiss unearthed so much information related to Nussimbaum, that it's surprising his personage was surrounded by so much mystery for so long.
I can only wait for Nussimbaum's other works to be republished as his style of writing is immersive, pleasant and accessible.
The parts of 'The Orientalist' that are nicest to read are the ones that deal with Nussimbaum himself, or his experiences. However, Reiss also spends lots of time on describing the political situations of all the arena's Nussimbaum was affected by. Although not too uninteresting in itself, it makes this book into a bit of a history lesson where, occasionally, Reiss really goes too far, bordering on the verge of boring the reader.
More recently, I read Kurban Said's other novel, , and although this one was less impressive, it still had some very good moments. As 'my' copy of Ali and Nino was published in the 1970s, this book had slightly more info on the author, actually saying that 'Kurban Said' was a pen name.
Reiss, fascinated by the book Ali and Nino, during a trip to the Caucasus a few years ago and a Jew himself, was captivated by the mysteries surrounding the book's author and ended up excavating related information and talking to relevant individuals for several years, before coming up with the definitive answer as to who the man, Kurban Said, Essad Bay, Lev Nussimbaum, was: A jewish refugee from Azarbaijan, who, after a spectacular flight through central Asia, running from the Bolsheviks, returned to Baku, only to leave once more, with his father, for Constantinople and, later, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, briefly staying in the US, to end up in the Italian coastal town of Positano, where he died from a rare and incurable disease.
Nussimbaum's story is certainly tragic but also amazing, reading like an adventure novel itself, in part because of his extreme genius as an author, penning a very wide range of books, including biographies on Stalin, Lenin and Czar Nicholas II as well as others. But also because during his short lifetime, he died in his 30s, he was in contact, or even close friends, with a whole laundry list of important social and historical figures of his age. In fact, Reiss unearthed so much information related to Nussimbaum, that it's surprising his personage was surrounded by so much mystery for so long.
I can only wait for Nussimbaum's other works to be republished as his style of writing is immersive, pleasant and accessible.
The parts of 'The Orientalist' that are nicest to read are the ones that deal with Nussimbaum himself, or his experiences. However, Reiss also spends lots of time on describing the political situations of all the arena's Nussimbaum was affected by. Although not too uninteresting in itself, it makes this book into a bit of a history lesson where, occasionally, Reiss really goes too far, bordering on the verge of boring the reader.
May 31, 2017
Tom Reiss' The Orientalist accomplishes something rare. This biography takes the reader into a world as exotic and foreign as anything on this side of science fiction. The center point for this wonderful, factual journey was born Nev Nussimbaum, scion to a rich oil family in Baku, Azerbaijan in the Imperial Russian Trans-Caucuses . The Russian Revolution would displace his family and ultimately drive him into Turkey. Here he would convert to the Muslim religion adopt the name Essad Bey and begin to pose as a prince of the region. Ultimately he would become a writer, (perhaps?) of the book that made him a national literary figure back in Azerbaijan. He would be a regular figure in European Café Society , marry into the title of Baron, associate himself with the Nazis and die in poverty and obscurity.
This is less than an exhaustive list of the unusual life and unlikely times of Nev Nussimbaum/Essad Bay. The Orientalist frequently reads more like a cliff hanger than a well-researched biography. There is more than enough drama and close escapes to justify the analogy and more than enough documentation to validate Reiss standing as a biographer.
Through Nev/Essad/BaronRolf von Ehrenfels , the reader will become familiar with places and history exotic and remote. From Azerbaijan where oil ran so close to the surface that the Caspian Sea was said to catch fire from the runoff. We will be taken into Turkish Harems and the more exotic love lives of the German Weimar elites. It is in Europe that Reiss `s writing will become uneven. Perhaps because we are more familiar with the Lost Generation, and have many references to predepression era decadence and the society of literary expatriates that the later part of The Orientalist seems to drag. We have seen into the exotic, the dangerous and into places now lost to history. Towards the end of the book, we are asked to be as fascinated with what is in outline familiar and merely dissolute.
Between having survived the Communist Revolution and having made himself into a public Muslim, his decision to become cozy with the Nazis may have been strategic , or logical, but has a scent of opportunism. It may have saved his life, or perhaps it was a matter of each side exploiting the other. That this delicate point is not entirely resolved brings up...
Reiss does an admirable job of covering the story of his subject and placing his subject in his historic and regional context. Reiss explores some of the uncertainties about of what is known and believed to be true without taking sides. Tom Reiss knows when the facts are conclusive and when to leave conclusions to the reader. He likes his subject, but will not be his advocate in all cases.
The Orientalist is somewhat uneven, but the story is compelling and fascinating. The skill of the writer places this book easily in the hands of a more general reader and takes that reader into another world. That this other world is or was real makes this a very easy book to recommend.
This is less than an exhaustive list of the unusual life and unlikely times of Nev Nussimbaum/Essad Bay. The Orientalist frequently reads more like a cliff hanger than a well-researched biography. There is more than enough drama and close escapes to justify the analogy and more than enough documentation to validate Reiss standing as a biographer.
Through Nev/Essad/BaronRolf von Ehrenfels , the reader will become familiar with places and history exotic and remote. From Azerbaijan where oil ran so close to the surface that the Caspian Sea was said to catch fire from the runoff. We will be taken into Turkish Harems and the more exotic love lives of the German Weimar elites. It is in Europe that Reiss `s writing will become uneven. Perhaps because we are more familiar with the Lost Generation, and have many references to predepression era decadence and the society of literary expatriates that the later part of The Orientalist seems to drag. We have seen into the exotic, the dangerous and into places now lost to history. Towards the end of the book, we are asked to be as fascinated with what is in outline familiar and merely dissolute.
Between having survived the Communist Revolution and having made himself into a public Muslim, his decision to become cozy with the Nazis may have been strategic , or logical, but has a scent of opportunism. It may have saved his life, or perhaps it was a matter of each side exploiting the other. That this delicate point is not entirely resolved brings up...
Reiss does an admirable job of covering the story of his subject and placing his subject in his historic and regional context. Reiss explores some of the uncertainties about of what is known and believed to be true without taking sides. Tom Reiss knows when the facts are conclusive and when to leave conclusions to the reader. He likes his subject, but will not be his advocate in all cases.
The Orientalist is somewhat uneven, but the story is compelling and fascinating. The skill of the writer places this book easily in the hands of a more general reader and takes that reader into another world. That this other world is or was real makes this a very easy book to recommend.
June 8, 2012
Fascinating story of the classic tragic hero who wanted a life bigger and brighter than his own which in truth wavered between the unbelievable/impossible and the realities of Nazi Europe. Are people who they say they are, or who they want to be?
Leo/Lev Nussimbaum was born to Jewish parents in October 1905, but presented himself as a Muslim aristocrat of Persian and Turkic heritage, or whatever he felt was most advantageous to him given his geographic, economic and political circumstance. What is true is that he was the author of Blood and Oil in the Orient and Ali and Nino, as well as dozens of other works, while surviving in one of the greatest war zones in one of history's most volatile times. He died at the age of 36, impoverished, in Positano.
Read this book also if you're interested in the history of Judaism, early Nazi Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the oil industry -- late 19/early 20C -- or fraud versus imagination, survival versus ambition.
Leo/Lev Nussimbaum was born to Jewish parents in October 1905, but presented himself as a Muslim aristocrat of Persian and Turkic heritage, or whatever he felt was most advantageous to him given his geographic, economic and political circumstance. What is true is that he was the author of Blood and Oil in the Orient and Ali and Nino, as well as dozens of other works, while surviving in one of the greatest war zones in one of history's most volatile times. He died at the age of 36, impoverished, in Positano.
Read this book also if you're interested in the history of Judaism, early Nazi Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the oil industry -- late 19/early 20C -- or fraud versus imagination, survival versus ambition.
May 14, 2013
Part biography, part history. I enjoyed it at first and felt like I was learning a fair bit. Then the chapter on Weimar Germany happened and for me it never really got better--possibly just because life intervened and I wanted to get done with the book already, which is never the best mood for reading, but possibly because the history was explained in too dense a fashion, with too much time spent on the life stories of people who encountered Lev Nussimbaum at some point, or didn't but were important on the scene at the time. I'm sure a lot of the problem was me. Interesting subject matter though, if you're in the right mood for it. I did really enjoy reading about all the eccentric folk Reiss encountered in his research.
May 29, 2007
A must-read for everyone who is familiar with "Ali and Nino" and is interested in the true identity of Qurban Said (aka Essad Bey, aka Lev Nissimbaum). This is one of the few cases when the adventures and exploits of an author are no less - may be quite a bit more - entertaining and exciting than the life of his heroes.
Tom Reiss did a marvelous job putting together the most convincing theory unveiling the identity of Qurban Said, and an equally admirable effort is devoted to uncovering the flaws of other theories on this subject.
Tom Reiss did a marvelous job putting together the most convincing theory unveiling the identity of Qurban Said, and an equally admirable effort is devoted to uncovering the flaws of other theories on this subject.
May 22, 2019
Absolutely loved it!
Great research and scholarship not only on Lev Nussimbaum but also on East-West relations during the first half of the XXth century, Jewish Orientalism, Zionism, European colonialism, Nazi Germany... Even if not all points are well developed (the case for Nussimbaum's authorship of Ali and Nino, for example), it reads like a novel and whether you agree with the author's points or not, you are in for a great time!
Great research and scholarship not only on Lev Nussimbaum but also on East-West relations during the first half of the XXth century, Jewish Orientalism, Zionism, European colonialism, Nazi Germany... Even if not all points are well developed (the case for Nussimbaum's authorship of Ali and Nino, for example), it reads like a novel and whether you agree with the author's points or not, you are in for a great time!
February 27, 2018
Brilliant book, expertly shifting between the life of the extraordinary Lev Nussimbaum and the historical events that took place during his life.
Gives a great overview of Russia, Europe and the Caucasus in the eventful first three decades of the 20th century.
Tom Reiss is a very skilful detective and storyteller, and I already look forward to reading another historical biography by him.
Gives a great overview of Russia, Europe and the Caucasus in the eventful first three decades of the 20th century.
Tom Reiss is a very skilful detective and storyteller, and I already look forward to reading another historical biography by him.
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