Bob Newman's Reviews > The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

Jewish Chameleon Pens Azeri Love Story and Vanishes

Let’s have a film fade out here and emerge fifty years ago in 1971. (The much younger) Bob Newman is reading a love story that takes place in the Caucasus around the turn of the 20th century. It’s an engrossing read and he (Bob, that is) feels pleasure thinking that he was able to find a novel from Azerbaijan, one that nobody else around him had ever mentioned. In fact, he never hears another word about Kurban Said, the author of “Ali and Nino”.

Now let’s fast forward to 2005 or 2006. Suddenly Bob reads a review of this book, “The Orientalist” and realizes that whoa!, that’s about the author of the book he read 35 years before. And hey!, it’s a shock to learn that “Kurban Said” was actually a Jewish guy named Lev Nussimbaum who lived most of his life in Europe. It took Bob a while, but well, that’s his turtle-like m.o. He finally got hold of the book and read it now, in 2021.

THE ORIENTALIST is a fantastic tale of a very interesting, if slightly unbelievable, character. The author of the biography did a great deal of research, digging up just about everyone and anyone who, still alive in the 1990s, had known Nussimbaum or those who’d known him. He combed obscure archives for the slightest bits of material. You see, Nussimbaum died in Positano, Italy in 1942. He was born in 1905 in Baku—then Russia—now Azerbaijan, the original petroleum capital of the world. His father was an oil millionaire, his mother a leftwing revolutionary who killed herself when Nussimbaum was young. Other than that, very few people, before this book got published, knew much about the “Jewish chameleon” who at times seemed to be Russian Jewish, at times, Muslim Azerbaijani or Turkish, Persian, or German. He had several aliases, many passports or identity papers, and moved about Europe, Central Asia, and America for most of his short life of 37 years. He escaped the murderous Bolsheviks with his father by sailing across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, then traveling by camel caravan to Bukhara, from there back to Persia. They crossed into Azerbaijan once more in the short period when the three Transcaucasian countries “enjoyed” independence, then fled to Georgia and hence by ship to Istanbul. Eventually the youthful Nussimbaum spent some time at a strange German school on an island off the coast.

In Berlin, he finished high school while simultaneously enrolled in a school of Oriental Studies. He became a writer, though the transition is not well-described in the book, so that the reader wonders how he jumped from “student” to “writer”. This seemed one of the weaknesses of the book. The chaotic German revolution and economic collapse are covered very well, as is the picture of the Caucasus in 1917-1921. These are some of the most interesting and well-written parts of the book.

As a Jewish refugee of uncertain status in a country of rising anti-Semitism and ultimately Nazism, Nussimbaum had to be quick, brave, and sly to stay one step ahead of the bureaucracy. How he did so is what you will learn by reading the book, as well as what he wrote, his rather weird marriage, his trip to America, and his lifelong hatred of Communism. Nussimbaum embraced a highly romantic Orientalism (nothing to do with Edward Said), converted to Islam, changed his name, and believed in the melding of the Jews with other Asiatic peoples due to his idealized vision of a pre-1917 Caucasus. I’ve only scratched the surface here. After he died, several other people claimed to be Kurban Said, and said they’d written “Ali and Nino”. The Azerbaijanis apparently had taken it as their national novel. Tom Reiss’ task was to separate fact from fiction.

The thing is that it was extremely difficult to get to the bottom of a lot of Nussimbaum’s life. He definitely made up a lot of stuff, claimed to have been many places where he could not have been, to have fought when he was just a kid, etc. Reiss had to fill in many gaps. Is that biography or fiction? Sometimes I felt it was the latter. Plus I ran into some passages like “territories like Turkestan were sparsely populated badlands whose inhabitants were either nomadic hunters or primitive farmers….” (p.54) Maybe he meant Turkmenistan, but there the people were mainly herders. Turkestan had been the home of elaborate civilizations for a couple of millennia. And again, on page 106 he blithely says that the Japanese joined the anti-German/Turkish coalition at the end of WW I. This is completely untrue. Japan joined in the second month of the four year war. And probably a careless phrase on p.109 about Young Turk leaders escaping to Berlin on German torpedo boats. So, you know, I had a few doubts about accuracy here. However, as a biography of a very interesting and little-known person, THE ORIENTALIST is well-worth reading.