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Solving The Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
by Tom Reiss
Book Reviewed by:'Mixing memory with desire, this marvelous and original book once more reminds us of ways through which the imagination becomes a refuge from the uncontrollable cruelties of reality.'
Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, 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 names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across 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 true identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck–also a friend of both 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 the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–discovered in a 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 the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker, 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. Reiss's quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles.
As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum's deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century–of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, The Orientalist is an astonishing book.
Introduction
On the Trail of Kurban Said
On a cold November 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. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said's small romantic novel Ali and Nino. Mayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about the book: "You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it's an interior, and it's quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger–that's this novel!" A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Ali and Nino had been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author's identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had ...
Reiss takes us on an intriguing search to uncover the true identity of the author of the 1930's cult novel, Ali and Nino - Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who became a Muslim prince, who became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany. Nussimbaum's life began in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in 1905. Baku was once the oil capital of the world - a place 'where Islam and the Orient were filtered through a multicultural European lens'. When the Soviet's took over Nussimbaum and his father fled for the Persian deserts, where Nussimbaum lived the live of a nomad and converted to Islam. In the late 1920s he had become a bestselling author in Germany using the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, until he was forced to flee for Italy, where he died in 1938...continued
Full Review
(227 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
Mixing memory with desire, this marvelous and original book once more reminds us of ways through which the imagination becomes a refuge from the uncontrollable cruelties of reality. Jonathan Rosen, author of Joy Comes in the Morning
'The Jew is most happy when he remains a Jew,' Albert Einstein is quoted as saying in this fascinating story about a man who extravagantly rejected this principle. Lev Nussimbaum didn't so much embrace a new religion as invent one. Tom Reiss's investigation into how he did this, and why, reads like a thrilling detective story peopled by unforgettable character and shadowed by the dark forces of 20th century history and, above all, by the mystery of human character. Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley
Tom Reiss's The Orientalist is a remarkable story of East meeting West, and the fantastic historical figure who stood astride both worlds, during an almost equally fantastic moment in time. This is history and biography that reads like a great novel. Paul Theroux
I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.The story of Lev Nussimbaum's life starts in Baku, the capital of
Azeraijan at the turn of the 20th century.
Thanks to the joys of the internet you too can travel to Baku by browsing the local English language newspaper, the Baku Sun,
which includes a guide to the city
and even what's on the TV today. Isn't the web a wonderful thing!
Ali and
Nino (1938) and The
Girl From The Golden Horn (1939) by Said Kurban (aka Lev
Nussimbaum) are both available at Amazon. Writing as Essad Bey,
Naussimbaum is also believed to be the author of Blood and Oil in the
Orient (1929), Stalin, the Career of a Fanatic (1931), and
various other titles.
...
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