The Voice of Mirza Xazar: Category Across Azerbaijan

The Turkic people's 'Journey of a Thousand Years'

Mirza Khazar — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 16:59:00 -0500

The Turkic people's 'Journey of a Thousand Years' London's Royal Academy of Arts celebrates the rise of the Ottoman Empire By Lana Asfour Special to The Daily Star Wednesday, March 02, 2005 LONDON: At the height of its military power in the 16th century, Sulyman I, named "the Magnificent" by Europeans, extended the Ottoman Empire into Hungary, Albania, Transylvania and Moldavia, captured Rhodes and Tunis, and even reached the gates of Vienna. At the same time, art and architecture flourished and developed a distinctive Ottoman style that was different from contemporary Islamic empires in Iran and India. The historical and cultural influence exerted by the Ottoman Empire over the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is commonly recognized in Lebanon, and is currently being celebrated at London's Royal Academy of Arts. While today we may marvel at the fact that a Muslim empire was respected, admired and feared by Christian Europe, the exhibition "Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600" shows us just how it reached this peak. In this exhibition, in fact, the Ottoman Empire appears only as the final stage of an entire millennium in which various Turkic peoples held power in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Wandering through the 11 large exhibition rooms, we can only stare in amazement at the displayed artifacts, which reveal the breadth and diversity of cultures that intermingled with a variety of Turkic dynasties throughout the period. In room after room of exotic and familiar objects, from stones bearing Runic script to intricately woven rugs and finely wrought metalwork and painted ceramics, it is hard to say whether one can legitimately group together the artistry of all these different peoples, from so many cultures and ethnicities, and in a vast geographic space over such an extensive period of time, and attribute them to a single race, identified as the "Turks." And indeed, the exhibition distinguishes between several different peoples. It tells us that the Turks were nomads who first rose to power in Mongolia and the Altai in the sixth century, and who were considered to be barbarians by the Chinese, their trading partners. There soon emerged the Turkic empires of the Khazars (650-965), based in the area north of the Aral Sea to the Ukrainian Steppes, and the Uighurs (744-840) in Inner Asia. Over the next millennium, the Turks adapted to their environment and encountered neighboring peoples across an enormous region stretching from western China to the Balkans. When the early empires fell, Turkic tribes migrated into Central Asia, Iran and Turkey. Some became slave soldiers in the Islamic empires of Baghdad and Cairo, but after 1000, the Turks defeated native Persian and Arab rulers and became powerful participators in diverse, polycultural societies. The exhibition centers on periods and areas in which the Turks were prominent. It begins with their early adaptation to settled life along the Silk Road, the only trading route between China and the west, in what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The Silk Road passed through the territories of various peoples: Parthanians of Iran, Soghdians, Turks, Indians, Chinese, Tibetans. Diverse religions rubbed shoulders: Christianity (mainly Nestorian, from fifth-century Constantinople), Manichaism (a Middle Eastern religion based on light and darkness), Mazdaism (a local form of Zoroastrianism) and paganism. This is evident on gravestones from Semirechye and Kyrgystan, on which we can make out a fascinating combination of symbols, including a Nestorian Christian cross and a Buddhist lotus flower that represents enlightenment. Other displays include a pagan statue of a female figure, wall paintings from Buddhist temples, wooden vessels painted with lines and animals reminiscent of Chinese textiles and artifacts with representations of Christianity and Turkic folk beliefs. As the Turks moved west to Central Asia, they began to adopt Islam. There were several dynasties, including the Ghaznavids (976-1186) of Afghanistan and northern India, the Qarakhanids (992-1212) of Central Asia, the Great Seljuks of Iran (985-1194), and the Anatolian or Rum Seljuks (1085-1200s), who were finally overrun by the Mongols. The galleries reveal the vibrant court culture of the Great Seljuks, its great palaces and brilliant ceramics, metalwork and books, and a masterpiece of weaving - the 13 th-century carpet from the mosque built for Sultan Aala-Eddin in Konya. But among some of the most unique and mysterious artistic treasures are the paintings attributed to Mohammed Siyah Qalam (Mohammed of the Black Pen), exhibited for the first time outside the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul. With starkly outlined, deep-colored figures and calligraphic writing, these paintings represent Turkic nomadic life in the steppes of Central Asia. They feature delightful and intriguing images of mystic Sufi dervishes, Buddhist monks, demons wrestling, dancing and being mischievous, and Turkic nomads in campsites, going about their daily lives. From the late 1300s to the early 1500s, as Genghis Khan's Mongolian empire collapsed, some Mongols were absorbed into local Turkic tribes (many of whom had come to Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia as Mongol troop contingents). Eventually, Timur (Tamerlane in the West), emerged from the splintering empires, and took power in Iran, Afghanistan and in Azerbaijan. The architecture and arts of Timur's era show his desire to assert legitimacy in the eyes of diverse peoples, such as the Persians and Turko-Mongols. While there are some impressive examples of histories celebrating Timur's military exploits, including the vividly detailed illustrated Book of Conquests by Sharaf al Din Ali Yazdi, the Timuric period was also hugely influential in the arts: a nine-foot-long architectural stroll, for instance, contains 114 complex Islamic decorative patterns and inscriptions for builders and craftsmen, which helped to disseminate a unified Tumeric aesthetic and style throughout the empire. One of the principalities formed after the Mongol defeat of the Anatolian Seljuks in the 13th century was ruled by Osman. His gradual dominance over the others led to the Ottoman dynasty which expanded and, under Murad I, came to control Anatolia, the Byzantine lands and the Balkan peninsula. Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, and the city came to be populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Ottoman society was multi-ethnic, and under Mehmed II both European and Islamic traditions merged in art and literature, exemplified by the exhibited books in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and by portraits of the Sultan by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. But the wonderful Ottoman Iznic ceramics, with their vivid greens, blues and purples, also reveal the continued Chinese influence on the Turks, with their flowing floral designs, and the lotuses and rosettes in particular. The Ottomans continued to expand or consolidate their territory in wars with the Mamluks of Egypt, the Syrians, and the Safavids of Iran, and there were raids on Venetian and Hungarian lands. The galleries display some ornate examples of Ottoman armor, such as Suleyman the Magnificent's sword - its blade is decorated with golden calligraphy, and its hilt inlaid with ivory and encrusted with turquoises and rubies. Ottoman opulence and artistry is apparent in the rich silk brocade kaftans belonging to the sultans, and in the fine porcelain, detailed illustrated manuscripts, and intricate, skilled calligraphy. The exhibition has even gathered examples of work by Sinan (1489-1588), the chief architect of the Ottoman golden age, including the carved walnut doors of Murad III's pavilion. This exhibition covers such diverse peoples and such a vast geographical space that it becomes debatable whether it is actually valuable to categorize them all under the single identity of "Turks." Turkic tribes were influenced and changed by local circumstances, by migrations over large areas and encounters with an enormous array of other peoples, so it is difficult to affirm an essential "Turkishness" that covers all the dynasties and empires, from the Nomadic Uighurs and their ancient Runic script and Chinese inheritance, to the Great Seljuks of Persia and the Artuqids of Medieval Anatolia, to the Timurids and Turkmen, and finally the Ottomans. We cannot really assert that these peoples were all "Turks" in our modern sense of ethnic identity. The thousand years covered in this exhibition and the arts and artifacts it displays reveal that the Turks were, really, a people who merged with, adapted to and simply became other people. It is perhaps better to think of "Turks" as an exhibition about cultural transmission, cross-cultural encounters, and the ways in which related tribes can emerge and re-emerge through history with very different but sometimes overlapping cultural identities. This is undoubtedly an impressive collection of beautiful and surprising treasures, gathered together from museums around the world, including the State Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, the Staatliche Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the British Museum in London. It is, at the very least, a feast for the senses, and can only inspire wonder at old worlds and civilizations. "Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600" is on view at London's Royal Academy of Arts through April 12.

The Turkic people's 'Journey of a Thousand Years'

Mirza Khazar — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:59:00 -0500

The Turkic people's 'Journey of a Thousand Years'

London's Royal Academy of Arts celebrates the rise of the Ottoman Empire

By Lana Asfour

Special to The Daily Star

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

LONDON: At the height of its military power in the 16th century, Sulyman I, named "the Magnificent" by Europeans, extended the Ottoman Empire into Hungary, Albania, Transylvania and Moldavia, captured Rhodes and Tunis, and even reached the gates of Vienna. At the same time, art and architecture flourished and developed a distinctive Ottoman style that was different from contemporary Islamic empires in Iran and India. The historical and cultural influence exerted by the Ottoman Empire over the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is commonly recognized in Lebanon, and is currently being celebrated at London's Royal Academy of Arts. While today we may marvel at the fact that a Muslim empire was respected, admired and feared by Christian Europe, the exhibition "Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600" shows us just how it reached this peak. In this exhibition, in fact, the Ottoman Empire appears only as the final stage of an entire millennium in which various Turkic peoples held power in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Wandering through the 11 large exhibition rooms, we can only stare in amazement at the displayed artifacts, which reveal the breadth and diversity of cultures that intermingled with a variety of Turkic dynasties throughout the period. In room after room of exotic and familiar objects, from stones bearing Runic script to intricately woven rugs and finely wrought metalwork and painted ceramics, it is hard to say whether one can legitimately group together the artistry of all these different peoples, from so many cultures and ethnicities, and in a vast geographic space over such an extensive period of time, and attribute them to a single race, identified as the "Turks." And indeed, the exhibition distinguishes between several different peoples. It tells us that the Turks were nomads who first rose to power in Mongolia and the Altai in the sixth century, and who were considered to be barbarians by the Chinese, their trading partners. There soon emerged the Turkic empires of the Khazars (650-965), based in the area north of the Aral Sea to the Ukrainian Steppes, and the Uighurs (744-840) in Inner Asia. Over the next millennium, the Turks adapted to their environment and encountered neighboring peoples across an enormous region stretching from western China to the Balkans. When the early empires fell, Turkic tribes migrated into Central Asia, Iran and Turkey. Some became slave soldiers in the Islamic empires of Baghdad and Cairo, but after 1000, the Turks defeated native Persian and Arab rulers and became powerful participators in diverse, polycultural societies. The exhibition centers on periods and areas in which the Turks were prominent. It begins with their early adaptation to settled life along the Silk Road, the only trading route between China and the west, in what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The Silk Road passed through the territories of various peoples: Parthanians of Iran, Soghdians, Turks, Indians, Chinese, Tibetans. Diverse religions rubbed shoulders: Christianity (mainly Nestorian, from fifth-century Constantinople), Manichaism (a Middle Eastern religion based on light and darkness), Mazdaism (a local form of Zoroastrianism) and paganism. This is evident on gravestones from Semirechye and Kyrgystan, on which we can make out a fascinating combination of symbols, including a Nestorian Christian cross and a Buddhist lotus flower that represents enlightenment. Other displays include a pagan statue of a female figure, wall paintings from Buddhist temples, wooden vessels painted with lines and animals reminiscent of Chinese textiles and artifacts with representations of Christianity and Turkic folk beliefs. As the Turks moved west to Central Asia, they began to adopt Islam. There were several dynasties, including the Ghaznavids (976-1186) of Afghanistan and northern India, the Qarakhanids (992-1212) of Central Asia, the Great Seljuks of Iran (985-1194), and the Anatolian or Rum Seljuks (1085-1200s), who were finally overrun by the Mongols. The galleries reveal the vibrant court culture of the Great Seljuks, its great palaces and brilliant ceramics, metalwork and books, and a masterpiece of weaving - the 13 th-century carpet from the mosque built for Sultan Aala-Eddin in Konya. But among some of the most unique and mysterious artistic treasures are the paintings attributed to Mohammed Siyah Qalam (Mohammed of the Black Pen), exhibited for the first time outside the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul. With starkly outlined, deep-colored figures and calligraphic writing, these paintings represent Turkic nomadic life in the steppes of Central Asia. They feature delightful and intriguing images of mystic Sufi dervishes, Buddhist monks, demons wrestling, dancing and being mischievous, and Turkic nomads in campsites, going about their daily lives. From the late 1300s to the early 1500s, as Genghis Khan's Mongolian empire collapsed, some Mongols were absorbed into local Turkic tribes (many of whom had come to Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia as Mongol troop contingents). Eventually, Timur (Tamerlane in the West), emerged from the splintering empires, and took power in Iran, Afghanistan and in Azerbaijan. The architecture and arts of Timur's era show his desire to assert legitimacy in the eyes of diverse peoples, such as the Persians and Turko-Mongols. While there are some impressive examples of histories celebrating Timur's military exploits, including the vividly detailed illustrated Book of Conquests by Sharaf al Din Ali Yazdi, the Timuric period was also hugely influential in the arts: a nine-foot-long architectural stroll, for instance, contains 114 complex Islamic decorative patterns and inscriptions for builders and craftsmen, which helped to disseminate a unified Tumeric aesthetic and style throughout the empire. One of the principalities formed after the Mongol defeat of the Anatolian Seljuks in the 13th century was ruled by Osman. His gradual dominance over the others led to the Ottoman dynasty which expanded and, under Murad I, came to control Anatolia, the Byzantine lands and the Balkan peninsula. Mehmed II captured Constantinople in 1453, and the city came to be populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Ottoman society was multi-ethnic, and under Mehmed II both European and Islamic traditions merged in art and literature, exemplified by the exhibited books in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin and Ottoman Turkish, and by portraits of the Sultan by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. But the wonderful Ottoman Iznic ceramics, with their vivid greens, blues and purples, also reveal the continued Chinese influence on the Turks, with their flowing floral designs, and the lotuses and rosettes in particular. The Ottomans continued to expand or consolidate their territory in wars with the Mamluks of Egypt, the Syrians, and the Safavids of Iran, and there were raids on Venetian and Hungarian lands. The galleries display some ornate examples of Ottoman armor, such as Suleyman the Magnificent's sword - its blade is decorated with golden calligraphy, and its hilt inlaid with ivory and encrusted with turquoises and rubies. Ottoman opulence and artistry is apparent in the rich silk brocade kaftans belonging to the sultans, and in the fine porcelain, detailed illustrated manuscripts, and intricate, skilled calligraphy. The exhibition has even gathered examples of work by Sinan (1489-1588), the chief architect of the Ottoman golden age, including the carved walnut doors of Murad III's pavilion. This exhibition covers such diverse peoples and such a vast geographical space that it becomes debatable whether it is actually valuable to categorize them all under the single identity of "Turks." Turkic tribes were influenced and changed by local circumstances, by migrations over large areas and encounters with an enormous array of other peoples, so it is difficult to affirm an essential "Turkishness" that covers all the dynasties and empires, from the Nomadic Uighurs and their ancient Runic script and Chinese inheritance, to the Great Seljuks of Persia and the Artuqids of Medieval Anatolia, to the Timurids and Turkmen, and finally the Ottomans. We cannot really assert that these peoples were all "Turks" in our modern sense of ethnic identity. The thousand years covered in this exhibition and the arts and artifacts it displays reveal that the Turks were, really, a people who merged with, adapted to and simply became other people. It is perhaps better to think of "Turks" as an exhibition about cultural transmission, cross-cultural encounters, and the ways in which related tribes can emerge and re-emerge through history with very different but sometimes overlapping cultural identities. This is undoubtedly an impressive collection of beautiful and surprising treasures, gathered together from museums around the world, including the State Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, the Staatliche Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the British Museum in London. It is, at the very least, a feast for the senses, and can only inspire wonder at old worlds and civilizations. "Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600" is on view at London's Royal Academy of Arts through April 12.

Exploring the Life of an Author Who Wrote His Own Identity

Mirza Khazar — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:52:00 -0500

Exploring the Life of an Author Who Wrote His Own Identity By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: February 23, 2005 (The New York Times) In the cultural hothouse of Weimar Germany, few flowers bloomed quite as extravagantly as Essad Bey. His enormously popular books and articles opened a window on the Islamic world, the exotic tribes of the Caucasus and the political upheavals convulsing Russia. "Ali and Nino," written under the pen name Kurban Said, enchanted readers with its depiction of Azerbaijan on the eve of the Russian revolution and its romantic story of a Muslim prince's love for a Christian girl. For cultivated Germans, Essad Bey was the man of the East, the cosmopolitan Muslim who, in his writings, brought back treasure from the fabled lands of the caliphate. In fact, Essad Bey, the Orientalist of Tom Reiss's title, was a fictional creation. Although fond of posing for photographs in Caucasian tribal gear, or wearing a fez or turban, Germany's most beloved Muslim was actually a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum. Thereby hangs a wondrous tale, beautifully told, that took the author five years and patient detective work in 10 countries to reconstruct. Nussimbaum did not make things easy. A relentless fantasizer and self-inventor, he treated the facts of his life as dramatic material. In one of many improbable strokes of luck, Mr. Reiss tracked down his subject's last editor, who surrendered six leather notebooks containing autobiographical ruminations that Nussimbaum wrote as he lay dying in Positano, Italy. They proved to be problematic. Like everything that Nussimbaum wrote, fact and fancy were intertwined. It was Mr. Reiss's task to disentangle one from the other, a job he undertook with great enthusiasm and imagination. No wonder. The unvarnished truth rivals anything that Essad Bey ever conjured from the remote mountaintops of the Caucasus. The Nussimbaums came from Slutzk, a village in the Pale of Settlement. Abraham, Lev's father, headed for Baku to seek his fortune in the oil business, and there, in the waning years of the Russian monarchy, his son grew up, surrounded by mosques, minarets and enormous wealth. From early childhood, Lev feasted on tales of the Orient and wandered the Muslim quarter of the city, dominated by the palace of the Khans. The palace, and the desert outside the city, he later wrote, "became for me the epitome of peaceful, ancient, silent grandeur." Revolution broke the spell. Fleeing the Bolsheviks, the Nussimbaums embarked on a terrifying journey across Turkestan and Persia, territory that supplied Lev with rich literary material and the seeds of a new identity. The glories of Constantinople, which Lev reached in 1921, put the finishing gloss on the resplendent creation soon to be presented to the world as Essad Bey. "The new identity that was taking shape in his mind had the pedigree of a Caucasian warrior, half Persian, half who knows what," Mr. Reiss writes. "He would not arrive in Europe as a stateless Jew from the East, he would come dressed in an Ottoman fez or, when he felt like it, as a Cossack." In Berlin, Nussimbaum quickly found his place. At the prestigious Literarische Welt, the Weimar equivalent of The New York Review of Books, he became the resident expert on the East, writing on topics as various as King Amanullah of Afghanistan and a professional congress organized by former eunuchs, thrown out of work by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He wooed and won the chic, thoroughly modern Erika Loewendahl, a poet and, like Nussimbaum, a fixture in cafe society. A facile, stylish writer, Nussimbaum turned out books at a furious rate, all of them best sellers. He wrote biographies of Muhammad, Nicholas II, Lenin and Stalin, and a history of the secret police under the Bolsheviks. ("Who is this Essad Bey?" Trotsky wrote to his son in 1931.) He chronicled his early life and the Bolshevik takeover of Baku in "Blood and Oil in the Orient," and took his wide-eyed German readers along a fantastic tour in "Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus," where, he claimed, one could find a strange, secluded land called Khevsuria, "the political Switzerland of the Caucasus," reached by a long rope hanging from a cliff. There, anyone fleeing the police could find sanctuary. By the late 1930's, when the Nazis uncovered his Jewish identity, Nussimbaum needed that rope. When he could no longer publish in Germany, he left for Vienna and wrote two novels under the name Kurban Said. But time was running out. In 1938, Vienna fell to the Nazis, and Nussimbaum, who was pursued by revolution and chaos all his life, escaped to Positano on the Amalfi coast. He survived on charity but eventually succumbed, at 36, to Raynaud's syndrome, a rare gangrenelike disorder, leaving a trail of mystery and romance behind him. Mr. Reiss's efforts to pick up the trail become a parallel narrative to Nussimbaum's life. His inquiries lead him to a strange gallery of characters, most in their 80's or even older, and all of them extremely odd, like the Austrian baroness, isolated in a remote castle, who spends her nights writing the French text for an Israeli-German rock musical. Unfortunately, she has never actually seen a musical, so Mr. Reiss, at her request, finds himself performing bits from "On the Town" and "Camelot." At moments like these, Mr. Reiss's quest takes him right through the looking glass. "The Orientalist" is too long by a third. Mr. Reiss, reluctant to throw away any research, stops the narrative repeatedly to deliver a lengthy historical set piece as Nussimbaum moves from city to city, and he drags the reader a little too often into far-flung libraries and dusty offices as he follows up one lead after another. He is, to put it mildly, in no hurry to unfold his tale, but what a tale it is - mesmerizing, poignant and almost incredible. Mr. Reiss, caught up in the spell of Essad Bey, has turned around and worked some magic of his own. (The New York Times)

The Escape Artist

Mirza Khazar — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:45:00 -0500

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)

The Escape Artist

Mirza Khazar — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:45:00 -0500

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)