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Lev NussimbaumLev Nussimbaum (1905 - 1942) was a prolific, ethnically Jewish writer who reinvented himself as a Muslim under the pseudonyms Essad Bey and Kurban Said. Despite his being a Jew, his politics were such that, before his actual ethnicity was discovered, the Nazi propaganda ministry included his works on their list of "excellent books for German minds". He was born in Baku, Azerbaijan to a family of nouveau riche oil industrialists. In 1918 Lev's father fled Baku from the Bolsheviks, taking him on a caravan of refugees through Turkestan, Persia and the Caucasus where he encountered diverse cultures and religions. After a brief return to Baku while it was in the hands of the White Russian Army, in 1921 they arrived in the cultural melting-pot of Constantinople with thousands of other Russian refugees. Later, the Nussimbaums relocated to Paris and then to Germany, where Lev enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitt using "Essad Bey Nousimbaoum" as his name on the application. Nussimbaum's travels and encounters with Eastern religion and were formative and enchanting experiences for him. He converted to Islam in August of 1922 in Berlin, and began to tell people that he was related to the Emir of Bukhara. Around 1926 he became a writer for the journal Die Literarische Welt for which he contributed numerous articles and gained a reputation as an "expert on the East." By the early 1930s he had become a bestselling author in Western Europe writing about contemporary historical and political issues. His political stance was on the far right. In 1931, he joined the German-Russian League Against Bolshevism, the members of which, Daniel Lazare remarks, "for the most part either were Nazis or soon would be". He also joined the Social Monarchist Party, which advocated restoration of Germany's Hohenzollern monarchy. He also had connections to the fascistic Young Russian movement, headed by Alexander Kazem-Bek. 2005 While living in Berlin, he began a romantic relationship the Austrian baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels who did not know his true name and origins. He married poetess Erika Loewendahl, the dilettante daughter of shoe magnate Walter Loewendahl, but the marriage failed, ending in a tabloid scandal. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Essad moved briefly to New York City, but returned to Europe two years later. In 1938, his identity as a Jew was revealed, and he fled Nazi-controlled Vienna for Italy. Among the at least 17 works credited to him are early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Czar Nicholas II. At one point, Nussimbaum was requested to write (at great risk to himself) an official biography of Benito Mussolini. However, his best known and most critically acclaimed work is Ali and Nino, written under the name Kurban Said, a love story of an Azerbaijani Muslim boy and a Georgian Christian girl. A repeated theme in Ali and Nino and 1938's Girl from the Golden Horn is cross-cultural romance, probably not unrelated to his own relationship history (though Ali is certainly more a man of action that Nussimbaum). Tom Reiss, in his biography of Nussimbaum, The Orientalist, says that this book has now acquired a status as the national novel of Azerbaijan. In poverty, Nussimbaum died of Raynaud's disease at the age of 36 in Positano, Italy, at work on his last novel. Bibliography Works about Nussimbaum - Reiss, Tom, The Orientalist:Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Random House, 2005, ISBN 1400062659. Its promotional website was used as a reference for this article.
References *Lazare, Daniel, "Jews Without Borders", The Nation, March 28, 2005, 27-31.
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