The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss (PDF)

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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.

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⭐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 he had known also wrote under the pseudonym of Essad Bey.Lev was born in 1905 as a refugee 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 faiths 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. Fact 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 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. Bolsheviks declared a week of plunder where 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 and French, with 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 to 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, partly a Ottoman and 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 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 a 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 relatives of Pasternak, Chagall and Nabokov. Along with 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 and 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 since 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 unusual 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 Lev. 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, Mohammed 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. A son of French nobles and a 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.

⭐The Orientalist takes the reader through some of the great upheavals of the last 150 years, including the demise of the Russian Empire Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, both World Wars, the fate of the Russian Emigrees, the upheaval in Germany that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Reiss looks at these events through the eyes of young Lev Nussimbaum, and the story is remarkably fresh with a unique point of view. There are many side adventures in the Orientalist which I found fascinating and informative (the German enclave in Azerbaijan; the “Mountain Jews” of Azerbaijan, the society of Constantinople in the final days of the empire). All fascinating and fun reading.But I had to let the fun of reading this type of book override the frustration I felt from the almost total absence of any source reference. Basically, the author is saying “trust me, the story I am weaving is not completely made up.” And if it had not been for the fact that it is very well written and that the numerous subjects in the book are fascinating, I could not have stood it. At one point on P.186, there is a lengthy passage by D.H. Lawrence, but no attempt to advise the hapless reader where it came from. There are numerous references to individuals without assigning a name to them (the driver of the car responsible for the murder of Rathenau). There is an abundance of footnotes throughout the book, but the footnotes are equally free of any source reference or citation. I was not sure why they were there instead of in the main body of the text.You might get the idea that I did not enjoy reading the Orientalist, or that I would not recommend it. But you would be wrong. I am just grumbling about the nature of this kind of writing, and it is a big risk for the author. It is more essay than anything else. There are other books out there like it, but not many. It is a distinctly journalistic style of telling a story, but it requires a great deal of faith from the reader. One such book is “The Africans” by David Lamb, also a journalist, written as a story, without facts to clutter things up. I liked that book too.Another aspect of the book which I found frought with peril was the political one. The book is told from the perspective of the wealthy son of an Azeri oil magnate who longs for the days of Empire. The Bolshevik revolution is exploding around him as he and his father escape to Georgia, Constantinople, Paris, Berlin. The Bolsheviks are portrayed as mirror images of the Nazis, as the model used by Hitler for the entire Nazi movement. Many volumes have been devoted to this subject and will be in the future. I though it was one of the weaknesses of the book and too important a subject to be left as one of the side stories. Were the Communists the same as the Nazis? Did they really have the same agenda or point of origin? Was one the originator of the other? Did they both represent the same kind of evil? Was Stalin the same as Hitler? Was he worse? I found it unfortunate that the book answered these questions in the affirmative without reservation. For me, the answers to these big questions deserve their own library.That’s all. I still liked the book enough to give it 5 stars. Go read it and decide for yourself.

⭐Exciting story,beautifully told, gripping and double enthalling because it is a true account of this extraordinary man’s life.

⭐… der Titel fasst schon die Hauptkritik zusammen: Autor Tom Reiss erzählt die fast unglaubliche Lebensgeschichte des aserbaidschanischen Juden Lev Nussimbaum. Der flieht unter abenteuerlichen Umständen mit seinem Vater nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg vor antijüdischen Pogromen aus Baku. Gelangt über Samarkand und Paris nach Berlin und erfindet sich dort neu: Er tritt zum Islam über und avanciert in den 30er Jahren zum muslimischen “Prinzen”, Bohemien und gefeierten Salonliteraten – bis er vor den Nazis wegen seiner jüdischen Herkunft nach Wien fliehen muss. Er schreibt bedeutende Biografien – u.a. über Stalin und Mohammed – und stirbt einsam an einer seltenen Krankheit im italienischen Positano. Leider beschreibt Reiss die politischen Hintergründe – die Zeitgeschichte – oft zu langatmig. Zwischendurch muss man immer wieder innehalten und sich fragen: Was hat das jetzt mit Nussimbaum zu tun? – Wenn man diese Passagen aber querliest oder überblättert, wird man mit einer mitreißenden Biografie belohnt. Sie macht Lust auf die Werke von Lev Nussimbaum: vor allem auf die anrührende Liebesgeschichte “Ali und Nino”, die unter dem Pseudonym Kurban Said veröffentlicht wurde.There are many good things about this book, such as the author’s exhaustive research into his subject, but that also can be its Achilles heel, so to speak. I found that sometimes the research into the period overwhelmed the author’s treatment of his subject, we kind of lost touch with ‘the Orientalist’ himself in learning about the period between the two world wars. That being said, it was also interesting to learn many often forgotten things about that time…such as that Germany could have gone communist as easily as it went fascist…it was a tumultuous time with both sides being very strong in Germany, leading no place for moderation in that society.

⭐This delightful biography of an enigmatic subject gives so much more than the story of one. Reiss creates a matrix in which the reader can directly experience the bizarre bazaar of past and present in Europe and the Middle East. Where enigma is the first rule of survival, the orientalist demonstates how human beings adapt to social conditions. This is a true today as it was one hundred years ago. In this book, we see how human destiny is dictated by power and moderated by instinct and intelligence. It certainly contributes to our understanding of what is happening now as history repeats itself with a new cast of characters.

⭐A little different that ‘The Black count’ in style but still an enjoyable read! Great history of the European political scene involving the characters. recomended for sure

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