The Voice of Mirza Xazar

The Escape Artist Was the author of Azerbaijan's national novel a Jew? A Muslim? A Weimar literary light? Deception was a matter of survival for chameleon Lev Nussimbaum. By Kim Iskyan Published: February 25, 2005 (The Moscow Times) With historical detective-story biographies on the rise, "The Orientalist" may well be an early entry in a new literary genre. Armchair historians with a bit of wanderlust will be rewarded with the engaging tale of the life and times of Lev Nussimbaum, an inadvertent adventurer in the 1920s and 1930s and author of the World War I romance, and Azeri national novel, "Ali and Nino." But no less entertaining is the story of the sleuthing of biographer Tom Reiss as he pieced together the disparate shards of Nussimbaum's life. And what a life it was. By Reiss' telling, Nussimbaum experienced more stomach-in-throat excitement and edge-of-the-precipice close calls in any given month than most of us do in a lifetime. Born in 1905 to a wealthy Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan, he came of age just as the walls were closing in on people with money (in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution) and people of Jewish heritage (Hitler's Germany). Nussimbaum made lemonade of his lemons, though, and his state of permanent adolescent transience -- a journey across Central Asia and Persia and into Turkey as a wide-eyed and remarkably precocious 14-year-old was a formative experience -- drew him to the exotic East, the defining passion of his life. Revolution forced the formerly cloistered child to learn on the fly how to survive on wit, guile, chutzpah and imagination. It wasn't long before Lev evolved into what Reiss terms an "ideological Houdini," very convincingly passing himself off as a Muslim under the names of Kurban Said and Essad Bey to reach the apex of the social and literary circles in Germany and Austria. (That he officially converted, twice, to the Muslim faith would have been irrelevant to most of his acquaintances, had they known, for Judaism was viewed as genetic, not a chosen faith.) He later married an heiress to a shoe fortune, keeping his true identity from her until their divorce was splashed across the pages of the tabloid press. The most enduring contribution Nussimbaum (or rather, Said) made to the literary canon was "Ali and Nino," an Azeri-Georgian "Romeo and Juliet" that is to Azerbaijan what "War and Peace" is to Russia. Writing primarily in German, he published innumerable articles and 16 books, including well-received biographies of Mohammed and Vladimir Lenin. Late in his life, Nussimbaum (or, better put, his Muslim reflection) came close to becoming the personal biographer for Benito Mussolini, a fantastically risky maneuver for a Jew in Italy in 1942. Against all odds, he died a natural death, at 36, of a blood disorder. But Lev's accomplishments are almost secondary; the tales of how he survived, and thrived, as millions of his cohorts perished form the core of "The Orientalist." Indeed, Nussimbaum managed to sow such confusion about his true origins, obscuring his background as the son of a Jewish oil baron -- partly for the thrill of it but more to survive the anti-Semitism that was sweeping across Europe -- that for 70 years the true authorship of "Ali and Nino" was a matter of simmering debate. At stake for Azerbaijan was nothing less than a sense of national self, which was anyway under dispute. "Prominent Azeris had to deal with the suggestion that their 'national novel' had been written by a Jew," Reiss wryly observes. Reiss helped bring the matter to a boiling point while conducting research for a 1999 article for The New Yorker, which he built upon for "The Orientalist." Reiss does an admirable job of providing the historical backdrop as Nussimbaum evades the clutches of one revolution after another, popping up repeatedly on the cutting edge of history, usually at exceptionally unhealthy places and times. Particularly entertaining are Reiss' encounters with colorful figures linked to Nussimbaum's past -- a cobwebby 96-year-old former editorial assistant who happened to have Nussimbaum's deathbed journals in her closet, a baroness writing a rock opera while ensconced in a castle in Austria with another piece of the puzzle of the man behind the various personas of Said/Bey/Nussimbaum -- which, together, provide some insight on the difficulties Reiss endured while unwinding the tangled yarn of Nussimbaum's life. A word of warning, however: Those less well-read bookworms who, for example, aren't intimate with 1930s German history, may find the sledding occasionally rough. Woven together, the parallel narrative strands -- Nussimbaum's biography and Reiss' detective work -- sometimes feel a bit rushed. Confusion can reign for the reader not thoroughly familiar with the often tangential characters and events that Reiss introduces and dispatches with head-spinning alacrity. Reiss might have cleared up some of these loose ends by concentrating on the five years of legwork he invested in retracing Nussimbaum's steps, tracking down a range of colorful characters who knew Nussimbaum directly and linking his real-life experiences to his writings. The story of how he tackled the challenge of Lev's life is itself illuminating and would have made for a compelling case study of investigative historical journalism. Alternately, a vanilla historical biography would have provided greater scope for exploring the fascinating dynamics that ricocheted Nussimbaum across Europe like a pinball. Reiss is guilty -- a bit refreshingly, in a global culture of the intellectual lowest common denominator -- of expecting a bit too much from the reader. Had he made room for more than a dozen hurried pages of historical overview here and there, wherever background is needed to flesh out the latest pickle in which Nussimbaum finds himself, he might have significantly strengthened the book. Criticism of literary overambition, though, is in many ways a compliment in disguise. Reiss generally achieves a good balance between the dual narrative elements. Upon reading the final page of "The Orientalist," the reader is left wanting more -- arguably the strongest sign that the author has succeeded. In any case, an entire book about the investigation entailed in researching another book would smack of navel-gazing to the extreme. Deception was integral to Nussimbaum's life, and Reiss's struggle to unwrap the multiple layers of his trickery was much of the battle of writing "The Orientalist" in the first place: the reality of the man's life as reflected in the process of trying to unravel it, after the fact. For the most part, Reiss retains an objective distance, carefully keeping the brutal backdrop of Lev's life from assuming the gold-tinged lining that Nussimbaum himself created in his written recollections. But he does lament the twists of fate that relegated Nussimbaum to the status of a forgotten footnote. Reflecting on a quotation from a magazine article by John Steinbeck about the small town in Italy where Nussimbaum died, which included a story about the village's "only Muslim," Reiss remarks: "The most jarring thing about the passage is that Steinbeck clearly has no idea that the man who occupies his amusing anecdote had been a famous writer only a decade before. They had been successful contemporaries in the 1930s, yet Steinbeck had survived to continue writing both great books and fluff like this, while Lev/Essad had fallen into an abyss." The Lev Nussimbaums of 2005 -- men and women forced to flee their homes, spend a lifetime evading persecution and longing to live in the absence of revolution -- face a very different world from that which Nussimbaum rebelled against. Regardless, they should be so fortunate to have a historian as thorough and gifted as Tom Reiss to document their travails. Kim Iskyan has written extensively on the former Soviet Union. (The Moscow Times)