Lev Nussimbaum

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Lev Nussimbaum (1905 - 1942) was a prolific Jewish writer who reinvented himself as a Muslim under the pseudonyms Essad Bey and Kurban Said. Despite his being an ethnic Jew, his politics were such that, before his origins were discovered, the Nazi propaganda ministry included his works on their list of "excellent books for German minds".

He was born in October 1905, according to himself in a train, though more probably in Baku, capital of what is today Azerbaijan, to a family of nouveau riche oil boom industrialists. His father, Abraham, had been born in Tiflis, Georgia, in 1875. His mother, Bertha Slutzkin, a Lithuanian Jew who committed suicide when Lev Nussimbaum was a small child, was possibly involved in the underground Communist movement. 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 along with thousands of Russian refugees. Later, the Nussimbaums relocated to Paris and then to Germany, where Lev enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin using "Essad Bey Nousimbaoum" as his name on the application.

Nussimbaum's travels and encounters with Eastern religion were formative, enchanting experiences. He converted to Islam in August 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 throughout Western Europe, writing mainly about contemporary historical and political issues.

His political stance was on the monarchical 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 dynasty. He also had connections to the pre-fascistic Young Russian movement, headed by Alexander Kazembek. [Lazare, 2005. Lazare, writing in The Nation, is rather free assigning the label of Fascist.]

While living in Berlin, Essad Bey began a supposedly romantic relationship with the Austrian baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, who is said not to have known his true name or origins. In 1932, he married poetess Erika Loewendahl, dilettante daughter of shoe magnate Walter Loewendahl, who often appears in photographs dressed as a man. Lev too, loved dressing up. The marriage failed, ending in 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 having been revealed, he fled Nazi-controlled Vienna for Italy.

Contents

[edit] Oeuvre

Among some 17 works credited to him are early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Czar Nicholas II. At one point, Nussimbaum was requested to write (a risky effrontery) an official biography of Benito Mussolini. Tom Reiss, in his biography of Nussimbaum, The Orientalist, claims Nussimbaum wrote the well-known and critically acclaimed short-novel Ali and Nino, written under the pen name Kurban Said, a love story between an Azeri Muslim boy and a Georgian Christian girl. Officially, the pseudonym Kurban Said was registered as belonging to Elfriede Ehrenfels, most likely because Lev Nussimbaum, being a Jew, couldn't publish in Nazi Germany. Relatives of Elfriede Ehrenfels claim she was the author, but the contents and style suggest Nussimbaum; also, the first Italian edition of Ali and Nino was published under the name Essad Bey. The key theme in Ali and Nino as well as the 1938 novella The Girl from the Golden Horn is cross-cultural reaching, interreligious equivocation and romance: clear Nussimbaum topics. Ali and Nino has acquired a status as the national novel of Azerbaijan, where many prefer to believe it was written by an Azeri author and poet, Yusif Vezirov Chemenzeminli, a Nationalist who, according to Reiss, frowned on cross-cultural equivocations.

Reduced to poverty, Nussimbaum died of Raynaud's disease in Positano, Italy, in September 1942, at age 36, leaving behind a dense notebook filled with autobiographical reflections and sketches for a new novel.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Blood and Oil in the Orient (1930, reissued by Aran Press, 1997)
  • Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus (1930)
  • Stalin: The Career of a Fanatic (1931)
  • White Russia: Men Without a Homeland (1932)
  • OGPU: The Plot Against the World (1932)
  • Nicholas II: The Prisoner in Purple (1935)
  • Allah is Great: The Decline and Rise of the Islamic World (1936) (with Wolfgang von Weisl)
  • Mohammed (Essad-Bey book) (1936)
  • Lenin (1937)
  • Ali and Nino: A Love Story (1937, reissued by Anchor, 2000, ISBN 0-385-72040-8)
  • Reza Shah (Essad-Bey book) (1938)
  • Girl from the Golden Horn (1938, reissued by Overlook Press, 2001, ISBN 1-58567-173-8

[edit] Works about Nussimbaum

[edit] References

  • Lazare, Daniel, "Jews Without Borders", The Nation, March 28, 2005, 27-31.
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