The Orientalist<

/div>I’ve been dying to write about this book — The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss — since I started it weeks and weeks ago. I first heard the author on NPR, then was first in line to get it at the library, and when it was clear that a) I wasn’t going to finish it and that b) I had to read this book more than once, I ordered it up at the new Manor Block Books in Troy. Got right into it, then thought I had lost it (it turned up, having fallen behind a chest in the bedroom). And now I’ve finally finished it, and have to say, it’s the most fascinating biography/history/story I think I’ve ever read.

So, how to describe it? Its subtitle is “Solving the mystery of a strange and dangerous life.” It’s the story of an author of biographies and fiction, once one of the best-known writers in the world in the time between the wars — but one whose identities became so confused that by the ’70s, when his great novel of love between a Christian girl and a Muslim boy was reissued (Life magazine wrote: “If Kurban Said can’t push Erich Segal off the bestseller list, nobody can!”), his true identity was completely lost. Tom Reiss tracks down Lev Nussimbaum, the Jewish son of an oil baron in Azerbaijan, who over the course of revolutions and upheaval in Russia, the Caucasus, and Germany came to be the “Mohammedan” Essad Bey, and who finally adopted the nom de plume of Kurban Said. His home in Baku entertained Stalin (and there are hints his mother may have done more for the revolutionary cause). Trotsky wrote to his son, “Who is this Essad Bey?” He lived in Berlin in the 1920s, among the Pasternaks and the Nabokovs. He was the subject of a divorce scandal that played large in the American tabloids. And he died young of a rare disease, in fascist Italy, remembered by the people in a seaside town only as “the Muslim.”

In with it all, Reiss manages to paint an incredible picture of the changes of the times — the revolution, the friction of east and west in the Caucasus, the rise of Hitler — and how all of it related to this man who was or wasn’t masquerading as something very foreign in places and times where it was phenomenally dangerous to do so. As I said, the best combination of biography and history I’ve ever read, and all in all an unbelievable story.

So now I’m following it up with “Kurban Said’s” classic “Ali and Nino.” Reiss traces the authorship of this book convincingly, but the paperback edition that is currently available still raises the possibility that this was a collaboration between Essad Bey and a German baroness, who in all likelihood was the only way the denounced author could get his book published in the National Socialist era — when Jews weren’t to be published, and several spies had expressed serious doubts about the Muslim identity of Essad Bey. The book retains the flavor of an earlier time, but writes convincingly and well of the love of a Muslim boy for a Georgian Christian girl — for everyone knows that Georgian women are the most beautiful in the world. A sample:

“‘Ali Khan, you are stupid. Thank God we are in Europe. If we were in Asia they would have made me wear the veil ages ago, and you couldn’t see me.’ I gave in. Baku’s undecided geographical situation allowed me to go on looking into the most beautiful eyes in the world.”

So what are you waiting for? Order already!