Who was Kurban Said?

THE ORIENTALIST: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF A STRANGE AND DANGEROUS LIFE

By Tom Reiss

Random House, $25.95, 433 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY SONAT HART

From the turn of the century to the rise of Nazism, acculturated Jews across Europe found themselves caught between two worlds. On the one hand, they were estranged from maintaining a purely Jewish identity for it no longer defined them entirely, while on the other hand, assimilation, even when it included name changes and conversions, failed to gain them complete acceptance. In response to this dilemma some Jews ignored anti-Semitism and tried to fit in as best they could, others embraced Zionism, very few would take on the question of identity as creatively as Lev Neussimbaum, the subject of Tom Reiss’ book.

“The Orientalist,” revives a time in history in which a largely Jewish cosmopolitan elite turned the coffeehouses of Vienna and Berlin into oases of intellectual freedom and bastions of literary culture, where one was free to reinvent oneself in name, in being, or both. It was an era in which Jews were lauded and loathed for their ability to express through their literature and themselves the cultural essence of the lands in which they lived. Mr. Reiss pays homage to this world as he recounts his quest to uncover the “strange and dangerous” life of an Orientalist.

Mr. Reiss stumbled on the mystery of Kurban Said in 1998 while on a writing assignment concerning the revival of Baku’s oil industry. Said was presented to him as having written the so-called national novel of Azerbaijan, “Ali and Ninol” (1937), which beautifully romanticizes the Baku that existed before the Russian revolution. It tells of a love affair between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl against the backdrop of a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic Caucasus, where battles are literally waged with poetry and oil bursts from the earth into 40-foot fountains creating farmer millionaires.

Fuad, Mr. Reiss’ guide in Baku, tells him, “This novel made me discover my country, it made me discover the whole world that lay beneath my feet, buried by the Soviet system.” Although this book has been embraced as a literary treasure, the real identity of the author has been deported from Azerbaijani memory and replaced with a more digestible fabrication, that of Azeri author, Josef Vezir. This might be because members of the Baku National Literary Society did not want the son of two Jews — a Russian revolutionary and Baku oil baron of Russian decent — to be the voice behind their national novel.

Mr. Reiss did not believe that Vezir wrote “Ali and Nino,” nor did he buy into the story that it was written by the Baroness Elfriede von Bodmershof, despite a thick dossier from the 1930s replete with swastika stamps affirming her claim. Mr. Reiss’ suspicion that someone else was behind Said was confirmed after finding the novel “Blood and Oil in the Orient.”

While the book jacket stated that it had been written by the same author as “Ali and Nino,” it did not list Said, but rather presented the names: Essad-Bey aka Lev Naussimbaum.

Mr. Reiss’ desire to untangle the identity of Kurban Said from that of Essad-Bey, from that of Lev Naussimbaum took him on a five-year adventure that brought him into the world of a man whose life was imbued with equal parts of fantasy and reality, and at times, it is hard to tell which is more incredible.

Lev Naussimbaum was born in 1905, a time of revolution, on a train during a Russian railroad strike somewhere along the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia. The circumstances of his birth would be a portent of things to come. His entire life would be haunted by revolution and upheaval and his identity would always be lodged somewhere between the Occident and the Orient. Descriptions of Naussimbaum’s youth read like a dramatic adventure story, filled with near death escapes, chance encounters, desert caravans, lascivious Persian nobility, meetings with Joseph Stalin, and a westward emigration route that took him through Constantinople, Paris, and on to Berlin.

Neussimbaum was an Orientalist long before he arrived in Germany, though it was in Berlin that he began to look the part. His connection to the Islamic Orient was established when, as a child, he would wander along the ramparts of the khan’s palace in Baku where he would imagine himself a prince. The orient offered him a way to see himself as a Jew beyond the constraints of European society, evident in the way he admired the Azeri Jews who were “always armed” and wore oriental dress.

Neussimbaum was not the only Jew in Germany who dressed up like an Arab or espoused a universal interpretation of Islam. He was joined by the German Jewish poetess, Else Lasker-Schler who at times, referred to herself as the “Prince of Thebes” and the staunch Zionist, Wolfgang von Weisl, with whom he wrote “Allah is Great: The Decline and Rise of the Islamic World.” Readers might be surprised to learn how involved members of the Jewish community were in promoting Oriental studies and the Islamic world.

Neussimbaum eventually converted to Islam and changed his name to Essad-Bey, at which time he served as an “expert on the East” for Die Literarische Welt, Germany’s most important literary magazine. Just shy of 30, Essad-Bey had authored 16 books (including a biography of the czar and Stalin and over 100 articles) causing his manager to tell him to slow down. After all, “one mustn’t be considered[too prolific].”

Despite Essad-Bey’s international fame as a literary spokesman for the East, his identity remained shrouded in mystery, so much so, that his heiress fiancee married him thinking that he was a Muslim prince. Maintaining this illusion was quite a feat considering he still lived with his Jewish father.

While some continued to celebrate Essad-Bey as a Muslim writer well into the 1930s, others began to defame him, including the anti-Semitic press and members of the Muslim community, who considered him a shtetl Jew in costume and “Jewish story swindler” by profession. Nevertheless, he continued to write under the pseudonym Said from the Italian village where he lived out the last years of his life battling a strange illness and hiding from the Nazis.

Mr. Reiss’ depiction of Neussimbaum’s life is writtten more in the vein of a historical mystery adventure than a biography. Mr. Reiss too is a character in this tale, a charming sleuth, who finds himself at the mercy of more than a few eccentric elderly ladies who seem to hold the key to Naussimbaum’s past.

The result of Mr. Reiss’ careful research and international schmoozing are evident on every page. The book makes use of interviews, letters, unpublished journals and manuscripts that were it not for Mr. Reiss might have been lost to history. His style is colorful and fluid and he manages to mediate well between Neussimbaum’s story and his own.

The same cannot be said for the historical interludes that describe, among other things, the nature of the Russian revolution, the Weimar Republic, and the demise of the three great empires. Mr. Reiss is, at times, so thorough in describing the historical landscape of the day, Neussimbaum gets relegated to the periphery. Nevertheless by providing his readers with historical perspective, Mr. Reiss is able to present a more sophisticated study. The case of Lev Neussimbaum — the Jew — is indeed a strange one, particularly since one is left thinking: Why not believe that he was a Muslim prince all along?

Sonat Hart is a professor of Jewish Studies and German at Baltimore Hebrew University.