The Evening Standard (London)
June 27, 2005
FREAKS, FRAUDS AND CASPIAN ADVENTURERS
THE ORIENTALIST: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF A STRANGE AND DANGEROUS LIFE
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
BY TOM REISS
CHATTO, £16.99)
When, in 1991, I first started visiting and writing about Baku, the
turn-of-the-century oil-boom city on the Caspian Sea (now capital of
the ex-Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan), I took a novel called Ali and
Nino by a mysterious author called Kurban Said.
I went to witness the civil wars of the Soviet break-up and found a
new ‘Great Game’ for the oil riches of Baku. The beautiful novel by
Kurban Said was a poetical celebration of love and cosmopolitanism
betwixt East and West in revolutionary times: the Romeo and Juliet
of the Caspian. Azeris told me proudly that this Moslem author was
Azeri. I longed to know: who was Kurban Said? No one knew. Later,
researching my biography of Stalin, I read one of the earliest Stalin
biographies by Essad Bey. Who was Essad Bey? No one knew.
Now Tom Reiss’s work reveals Kurban Said and Essad Bey are the same
man. Since I was familiar with Baku and those books, I feared this
might be another ignorant journalistic travelogue. Far from it.
Sometimes hilarious, often heartbreaking, beautifully written,
glorying in its tolerance and curiosity, The Orientalist is an
exquisite and flamboyant biography of one of the most mysterious
literary butterflies of our time.
Featuring a bizarre cast of freaks and adventurers, it is not only
a detective-story, but also an anthropological study and a crazed
alternative history of the early 20th century.
Kurban Said and Essad Bey were really Lev Nussimbaum, spoilt son of a
Baku oil tycoon born in a palace at the centre of that city’s grand,
cultured Jewish-Russian milieu just as the 1905 Revolution shook the
Romanov Empire and unleashed vicious ethnic battles between Armenians
and Turkic Azeris.
The Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917/18 shattered this
tolerant, rarefied world, destroying Nussimbaum’s fortune. Baku was
tossed savagely between Turks, British and Bolsheviks: the Nussimbaums
escaped via Persia and Georgia to Istanbul, thence to revolutionary
Germany. Fragile calm returned under Weimar. Here the Nussimbaums
spent their savings on Lev’s education and sank into emigre poverty
like other Russian refugees.
Then Lev converted from Judaism to Islam and his own romanticised
version of the Orient, re-making himself as Essad Bey, Muslim ‘prince’.
His vision resembled that of Disraeli in his novels: doesn’t every Jew
of Sephardic descent – Disraeli hailed from Morocco – harbour dreams of
Oriental grandeur? Essad Bey started to write a bestseller annually,
starting with Blood and Oil in the Orient. This new celebrity loved
to dress up in ‘Oriental’ costumes, play up for American journalists,
posing for photographs.
He knew everyone in Weimar Berlin and pre-Anschluss Vienna, then
married a beautiful jazz poetess, Erika Lowendahl, daughter of an
American/Czech shoe millionaire. The marriage ended in a notorious
society divorce that almost broke Essad Bey: she accused him of being
a fraud and keeping a harem! Heartbroken, he became Kurban Said and
wrote Ali and Nino.
He fled to Positano in Italy where he wanted to write Mussolini’s
biography but could only earn a living by giving his own rights to
an Austrian baroness, losing his identity as an author, until now.
‘The Moslem’ survived on the charity of a local contessa, an
Algerian-Italian drug/arms-dealer/paratrooper, and the local
pharmacist, who gave him morphine. He needed it: a rare gangrene,
Raynaud’s Syndrome, was agonisingly consuming Lev, aged 35. He died
in 1942.
No ordinary disease would do for Essad Bey, whose youth resembles
a Caspian Proust, whose adventures resemble Michael Moorcock’s Pyat
novels, whose death has something of The English Patient. Meanwhile,
everyone should read Ali and Nino, newly republished.
–Boundary_(ID_/yap/k7xEijHwmAwVe7RLA)–