An East-Meets-West Story

By JOSHUA HALBERSTAM

THE ORIENTALIST
Solving the Mystery of Strange and Dangerous Life
By Tom Reiss
433 pages. Random House. $25.95.

The late Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978 and an ongoing campus best-seller since, fatally tarnished the designation “Orientalist,” an honorific title previously embraced by scholars of the Eastern Muslim world. Many of these leading professionals were Jews, of whom a few converted to Islam. (For example, Muhammad Asad, widely considered to have produced the best translation of the Koran into English and a political player in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was born Leopold Weiss to a family of Orthodox Rabbis in Galicia Poland.) Said’s book lambastes Western scholars for their supposed imperial attitude toward Arabs, but it largely ignores the Jewish Orientalists who not only had great affinity for the Arab heritage but posited the Jews as rooted in that culture and as a bridge between the Islamic East and the West (Benjamin Disraeli affirmatively called the Jews ”Mosaic Arabs” and Arabs “Jews on horseback”). While European anti-Semites condescendingly hurled the term “Asiatics” at Jews, these Orientalists embraced the attribution.

Perhaps the most intriguing of these early 20th-century Orientalists was the mysterious Kurban Said, author of Ali and Nino, treasured by many Azeris as the national novel of Azerbaijan. Thing is, Kurban Said was the pseudonym of Essad Bey whose books about the Caucasus and biographies of Muhammad, Lenin, Stalin were best sellers across the continents. To further complicate matters, Essad Bey was the pseudonym of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew from the East who converted to Islam and never publicly acknowledged his Jewish roots, but whose Jewish identity largely determined both the circumstance of his life and death. Wearing a bandolier and Fez, claiming to be a scion of Turkish princes while sharing Russian émigré banter in Berlin café’s with the likes of the Nabokovs and Pasternaks, Lev’s pose was unique, for as Tom Reiss explains in this fascinating biography, unlike others who “offered the Jews as the mediators between East and West, Leo Mohammed Essad Bey Nussimbaum offered mainly himself.” But the “self” Lev presented to the world was shrouded in enigma, at once swashbuckling but savvy, ostentatious but secretive, wealthy while impoverished, fine-tuned to the world around him but also a self of his own invention.

Reiss account of this life story comes in three braided narratives. As the facts of Lev’s life are unclear, the biographer must turn detective, tracking false leads and competing claims of legacy. We are invited along as Reiss retraces Lev’s dramatic peregrinations. We examine scraps of discarded documents. And we listen in on interviews with the few who still remember Lev Nussimbaum, doddering acquaintances, now living in forsaken castles and exotic locales, each with his and her own agenda. These encounters, however, are far less interesting than the man they reveal.

Lev Nussimbaum’s breathless, bizarre, and brief life—he died at the age of 35—began in Baku, the oil-soaked capital of Azerbaijan, in 1905. His grandfather had left the Pale of Russia for the Caucasus and his father had become a wealthy industrialist in Baku. Lev’s mother’s life took a different turn and always remained a mystery to Lev—a radical communist, she had committed suicide. To escape the rampaging terrorism of the Bolsheviks, Lev and his father began their journeys on camel caravans and rickety trains across the landscapes of the Caucasus to Constantinople, where Lev was mesmerized by the Ottoman glory already disintegrating, on to Paris and eventually Berlin, absorbing customs and languages, persons and personas everywhere. His story includes a doomed marriage to an international Heiress, a stay in America and international fame as an author of works that reflected his faith in a moderate Islam as the “third way” beyond Communism and Nazism but in contrast to the materialistic, effete West. Unlike most Jews who sought to divest their identity by merging into the larger dominant culture, Lev adopted the even more conspicuous trappings of the strange, flamboyant foreigner from the East, but his last days were a poignant coda to this kaleidoscopic life. He died in Positano, Italy, impoverished and sick, chased by the Nazis, desperate to gain access for a projected biography of Benito Mussolini.

However, Reiss’ third braid is the most captivating of all. The historical context of Lev’s story steadily emerges in the foreground and provides the tale’s most dependable richness. Lev’s comings and goings were rushed responses to the transitional early decades the 20th century, a period sodden with violent irruptions and inexplicable allegiances of opposing ideologies strategically joined to destroy the fragile democracies of Russia and Germany. Particularly satisfying is the voyage into the ancient nations of the Caucasus and their neighbors, a history that reveals long spans of Islamic tolerance. The relevance to contemporary events is palpable.

Hovering behind the trio of storylines is the matter of Nussimbaum’s Jewish background. Lev belonged nowhere, but managed everywhere, the archetypical, rootless international Jew. To his public, the Orientalist proclaimed a pedigree of Islamic princes shed of Jewish forefathers. In his personal notebooks, however, he reconciles his biological ancestors with his new identity by imagining himself as stemming from a place where “savage, brutal warriors, knights and brigands, would be indistinguishable from Galician rabbis or workers if they were dressed in the correct clothes.” But Reiss, a grandchild of German Jewish refugees, never let’s us forget that however Lev Nussimbaum ignored his actual forbearers, the world in which he lived never did. To many Azaris, this meant denying Nussimbaum’s authorship of their beloved novel; in the case of the Nazis, this meant a denial of his right to live. Lev Nussimbaum was a multi-talented, distinctive and no doubt eccentric character of his time, but in this wonderful and instructive biography, we also recognize the tale of a Jew making his way in a hostile world.