I was searching for books about Azerbaijan and skipped over the country’s most famous novel, Ali and Nino: A Love Story
, because I didn’t know it was the country’s most famous novel. I was worried about getting stuck with some dreck. Then I saw that The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West was a well-reviewed non-fiction book about the adventures of an Azeri refugee in pre-WWII Germany, so I placed the order at the library.
The author of Ali and Nino was a man known variously as Lev Nussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said. In The Orientalist, Tom Reiss starts by trying to track down the disputed authorship of Ali and Nino and ends up finding the fascinating story of a true International Man of Mystery.
Lev Nussimbaum was born in October, 1905 to a Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan. His father was a successful oil well developer and his mother flirted with Communism. Even from the start, Nussimbaum’s biography was complicated. There is no known record of his birth. Even the day is in dispute, because both the Julian and Gregorian calendars were in use in the Caucasus in that time. His mother committed suicide when Lev was young, a fact that was kept from him for some time. And then when Lev was 15, the Russian Revolution made Azerbaijan a dangerous place for a wealthy oil well owner. The Nussimbaums left.
Their escape from Azerbaijan took them through Turkey, Paris, and finally to Germany. Lev developed a passion for the Muslim world from his travels, so he studied Arabic, converted to Islam, and took on the name Essad Bey. He also invented an aristocratic, White Russian ancestry on his mother’s side. Lev/Essad made a living as a writer and associated with a bohemian crowd, living very much the glamorous life in interwar Berlin. He married an heiress, traveled to the United States, and became a minor literary celebrity in the process.
Essad Bey’s celebrity and complicated backstory protected him from the first rounds of sanctions against Jews, but it was an open secret that he was really born Jewish and named Lev Nessimbaum. Eventually, his books were banned in Germany, his wife left him for an American, and he and his father were exiled to Austria. There, he published Ali and Nino under the pseudonym Kurban Said so that it could be sold in Germany.
Tom Reiss did impressive research to pull this book together. He traveled to Azerbaijan, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. He tracked down documents. He interviewed seemingly tangential people who turned out to be important and seeming important people who turned out to be tangential. He deciphered the tangle of names and the changing family history, but he was never able to verify Lev Nussimbaum’s birthday.
This book was not at all what I was expecting, but it was a great read, a combination of detective story, travelogue, and biography. Now, I will have to break down and read Ali and Nino.
