Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery,
"The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who
transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling
author in Nazi Germany.
Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at
the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution
in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing
under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books
about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became
celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, "Ali
and Nino-a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries,
published on the eve of the Holocaust-is still in print today.
But Lev's life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an
international heiress who had no idea of his true identity-until
she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New
York, George Sylvester Viereck-also a friend of both Freud's and
Einstein's-was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United
States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer-until
the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest in
the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last
book-discovered in a half a dozen notebooks never before read by
anyone-helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an
Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records,
love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a
yearlong investigation for "The New Yorker, he pursued Lev's story
across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as
dramatic andsurreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his
subject's life. Reiss's quest for the truth buffets him from one
weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman
throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to
an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles.
As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum's deliberately
obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds-of
European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book
smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists-that have also been
forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the
twentieth century-of the origins of our ideas about race and
religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism
and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, "The
Orientalist is an astonishing book.
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