Kurban Said: History of exotic writer unveils many lives
Kurban Said: History of exotic writer unveils many lives
History of exotic writer unveils many lives
By Jerome Weeks
The Dallas Morning News Review "The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life" by Tom Reiss Random House, "Ali and Nino" opens with a very telling geography quiz.
The 1937 novel is a minor classic, a "Romeo and Juliet" story of young romance and adventure set in the Caucasus Mountains amid warring Bolsheviks, Muslims and Christians. To introduce all of this to the reader, author Kurban Said has Ali's teacher pose a question: Trapped as this region of Azerbaijan is amid Iran, Russia and Armenia, which way should it turn: to Asia or to Europe? Where does its future lie? It's a trap the best-selling author himself never escaped. In the '20s and '30s, Said used the exotic image that Westerners have of his native land to shape a celebrity reputation for himself as a dashing warrior-prince, a mysterious, Near Eastern exile who'd eluded Bolsheviks and fascists. He eluded them because he never existed. Neither did his compatriot, Essad Bey, author of one of the first histories of the area, "Blood and Oil in the Orient." Both men were actually inventions of Lev Nussimbaum, son of a Jewish millionaire. He created these legends about himself just as he adopted Islam: out of a dream of the fabulous Orient, a childhood memory of his hometown of Baku, where Jews and Muslims interacted peacefully and the czars held sway before the Soviets smashed it all. With "The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life," Tom Reiss has written a spellbinding history of Nussimbaum's deceptions. I flatter myself as being reasonably conversant with the Russian Revolution, yet there's history here — of religious sects and nihilist assassins — of which I knew little. The late critic Edward Said famously argued that our notions of the "Orient" were as much a creation of Western imperialists as any cultural reality. But it's hard not to see Nussimbaum as a figure from the "Arabian Nights." His native region is so oil-soaked that hillsides, even the Caspian Sea itself, can roar into flame. Azerbaijan, it turns out, is based on the Persian word for "fire." And Baku is the seaport home of the oil millionaires, where mansions tower among the mosques, but the grandest building in town is a copy of the casino at Monte Carlo. When the Bolsheviks brought all this down, the Nussimbaums fled. Trekking across deserts and mountains, they eventually settled in Paris, then Berlin, then Italy — much like other Russian émigrés. In fact, the one thing the book truly needs is a good map. By this time, Nussimbaum had re-created himself as Essad Bey, Muslim and monarchist. He became a counterrevolutionary cultural interpreter, writing the first biographies of Stalin and Lenin. Even the Nazis found him fascinating: After all, here was a Semite who was more Caucasian than they were. What he actually was, Reiss argues, is a rarity nowadays, a Jewish Orientalist. It's a modern myth that Jews and Muslims have always been at war. For centuries, they often were the best interpreters of each other. Nussimbaum was so in love with his dream of pashas and turbans that he came to live inside it. But he finally, sadly, was unable to escape that dream, as World War II erupted around him. Reiss has uncovered diaries and letters and Nazi collaborators. He takes us with him as he follows shadowy leads through the streets of Vienna, interviewing relatives and publishers. It may be part detective yarn, part author biography, part travel saga, but "The Orientalist" is completely fascinating. Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
The Boy From Baku: Kurban Said
The Boy From Baku
By Elizabeth Kiem
March 4, 2005
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
By Tom Reiss
The arid, windswept capital of Azerbaijan is not a tourist mecca. Most travelers to Baku come in search of oil, not romance. But for many Azeris and not a few foreigners, a trip to this desert metropolis of dust, derricks and derelict buildings is nothing short of a pilgrimage. Guided daily along wide boulevards and labyrinthine alleyways, the romantic faithful come to Baku to trace the paths of literary lovers Ali and Nino. Published in 1937 under the pseudonym Kurban Said, "Ali and Nino" has been translated into 17 languages and embraced by Azerbaijan as its "national novel." The story revolves around star-crossed lovers — she a Christian, he a Muslim — in Baku on the eve of revolution, and captures the city's cosmopolitan heyday while exploring the richly exotic cultures of the broader Caucasus at that time. For decades, the nostalgic portrait of a past era and an enduring inter-ethnic love story, "Ali and Nino" was as well known as its author was mysterious. The identity of Kurban Said has long been the subject of heated, sometimes litigious, debate, with one camp claiming him as Azeri poet Josef Vezir, and another an Austrian baroness. Others asserted, correctly, that Said was a pseudonym for Essad Bey, a curious and prolific writer of biography and history living among expatriates in inter-war Berlin and Vienna. But crediting the enigmatic Bey only enhanced the mystery; Leon Trotsky himself, after reading Bey's book about Stalin, had wondered aloud, "Who is this Essad Bey?" American journalist Tom Reiss spent a decade tracking down the furtive provenance of "Ali and Nino." Doubting the claims of both the Austrian baroness and the Azeri poet, Reiss diligently conducted interviews, pored over letters and manuscripts, and shuttled between Europe and the Caucasus to better pin down the author who claimed to be both a Mohammedan prince and the official biographer of Mussolini. In "The Orientalist," Reiss makes the convincing case that Essad Bey was actually a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum. More than just the investigative account implied by its subtitle, "The Orientalist" is the story of a man who refashioned his roots to reflect his own sense of self. Nussimbaum was born in Baku in 1905, into the privileged world of an oil magnate's son in a town supplying half of the world's petroleum. Revolution, exile and world war would break open the bars of his gilded cage soon enough, but Nussimbaum's early youth would set a standard for the writer in later years, as a sort of anti-hero. As a teenager on the cusp of celebrity, he adopted the persona of Essad Bey. Institutionalized antisemitism was still to come in his adopted home of Germany, and it appears that his Islamic conversion was motivated neither by security nor by faith. Reiss suggests that in approaching an imam in the Ottoman Embassy in Berlin, Essad Bey was adopting citizenship into the multiethnic Oriental worldview he cherished, one he had glimpsed in Baku — where desert Arabs, tribal warriors and Persian potentates strolled together between mosque and café. When he went to literary salons, Bey sported fezzes, turbans, bandoliers and daggers, and therefore emerged as a curious conflation of romantic ideals and cultural stereotypes, consistent only in his distaste for a revolutionary world order. In the first half of "The Orientalist," Reiss expertly weaves Nussimbaum's story into a sweeping review of the ethnic makeup of the Caucasus and the history of the revolutionary movement of Russia. But by the time Essad Bey makes his flamboyant entrance, Reiss is at pains to keep his balance of history and biography. New waves of émigrés arrive in Berlin as steadily as the currency falls and political fates reverse, and Reiss struggles valiantly to debrief the reader on them all. The result is an acceptable, if selective, social history of Weimar in which Essad Bey meanders like the hero of a "Where's Waldo?" book. This is not entirely Reiss's fault. An eccentric in Berlin's cabaret culture is hardly exceptional. But it is part of the book's greater shortcoming. "The Orientalist" demystifies Kurban Said, but not merely because it has unmasked him. Reiss dutifully accounts for Nussinbaum/Bey's whereabouts during 36 years. And in a journalistic coup, Reiss even grants the story closure, having obtained Kurban Said's last manuscript, written on his deathbed in an Italian fishing village. He transmits the reminiscences of near-ancient school friends (Lev had big ears and was clever), reprints photographs of the dashing Bey (he was at ease among his closest friends) and quotes from the final lines of Kurban Said (he was still dreaming at his lonely end). But Bey is nearly silenced by the anecdotal evidence that Reiss has accumulated for his profile. There is little drama to be salvaged from the mystery he has solved; even scarcer is a sense of danger in the motivations of his politically buffeted subject; in short, an incredible life becomes easily, if sadly, credible. Essad Bey, it should be remembered, wrote a number of biographies, all of which were nearly as fantastic as his fairy-tales of the Caucasus. In his life, as in his writing, he allowed truth some elasticity, knowing that fact is only stranger than fiction when treated as such. Reiss should be applauded for setting the record straight, but it is his subject we must thank for making the life and times of Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey, aka Kurban Said, "strange and dangerous." Elizabeth Kiem is a journalist and a literary critic living in Brooklyn. FORWARD NEWSPAPER