Kurban Said, Lev Nussimbaum, and Tom Reiss

A while back I read the first novel Ali and Nino by Kurban Said and found it delightful. Time for a book bender! My library delivered.

The Girl From The Golden Horn

The second (and last completed) novel by Kurban Said is The Girl from the Golden Horn. It came out in German in 1938 and was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 2001. 

Achmed-Pasha Anbari with his daughter Asiadeh have left Constantinople for Berlin. He was a higher-up in the Ottoman administration and with the fall of the Ottoman monarchy at the end of World War I, he no longer feels welcome in Atatürk's Turkey. He does what he can in Berlin to scrape up enough money so his daughter can get an education; she's studying Comparative Turkish philology at university. She's the Girl from the Golden Horn.

While there still was an Ottoman empire, Asiadeh was promised to an Ottoman prince before she was of age. But what are the Ottomans now? Where even is her prince? She sends a letter to the Turkish consulate to forward on to the prince, asking him to either claim her or relinquish her. He chooses to relinquish.

That's fine because in the meantime she had a cold and met the university's doctor, Alex Hassa. She's in love, and Hassa, an unhappy divorcé, loves her back and needs her. They marry, go on a honeymoon, and settle in Vienna where Dr. Hassa starts a practice.

Then the prince shows up and now he wants to marry her. 

In Ali and Nino before politics intervened, the difficulties between the two were cultural: he was Muslim and she was Christian. This novel turns on similar lines except she's the Muslim and he's Christian. She doesn't wear the veil now. Does she miss it? Do girls really need to be educated? Hassa as it turns out is short for Hassanovič, that is the son of Hussein, and Dr. Hassa's family before they converted were Muslim. Does that help?

I don't think the novel was quite as wonderful as Ali and Nino, but still it was good. Asiadeh has to figure out what she wants and how to get there with her dignity intact. She does.

The Orientalist

In that post on Ali and Nino  I discussed the mystery of Kurban Said a bit. It's a pseudonym, but for whom? The likeliest candidate was Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905. He was a Jew, and grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan. Tom Reiss wrote an article for The New Yorker on Nussimbaum, and then expanded it into a book in 2005.

Lev's father was Abraham, a well-to-do oilman in Baku; his mother died when Lev was 6, likely a suicide because she'd been detected in revolutionary politics. During World War I, Lev and his father fled to Persia when there was violence in Baku; later they return to the short-lived Republic of Azerbaijan, but are forced to flee again when the Bolsheviks arrive, this time through Georgia and then Constantinople. They finally pitch up in Berlin, where Lev attends a high school for Russian emigres. (With the sisters of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov! Lydia and Elena, respectively. Elena is considered quite the beauty.)

And somewhere along the way, Lev Nussimbaum converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. 

As Essad Bey he becomes a best-selling writer of non-fiction in the 20s and the first half of the 30s, writing close to a book a year as well as becoming the Eastern Europe and Middle East expert for the magazine Die Literarische Welt, which also published Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. (Think New York Review of Books, Reiss says.) Busy, but they needed the money, especially after it became clear that the Bolsheviks weren't going away, and any claims Abraham had still in Azerbaijan were going to be valueless.

Nussimbaum got married, to a Bata shoe heiress, and divorced. The divorce was covered by gossip papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a controversial figure: Was he Jewish, was he Muslim, where was he really from? Nussimbaum claimed he was born on a train between Zurich and Baku, but he was given to romanticizing, so who knows? With a background like that it's unsurprising he was a staunch anti-Bolshevik. His anti-Communism and his conversion to Islam helped after the Nazis came to power for a while; his books still could be published in Germany until 1935. But he was on a lecture tour in 1933 and doesn't return to Germany, but stays in Austria. When Anschluss looks likely he wangles a contract to write a biography of Mussolini and moves there. (That biography never materialized.) By then his health is poor; he has a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome, which leads to gangrene and the amputation of his toes. To deal with the pain he's become addicted to morphine. He dies in Positano, Italy, in 1942.

And did he write those Kurban Said books? The evidence Reiss offers is pretty strong and Reiss thinks they were entirely Nussimbaum's work. But Nussimbaum was willing to co-author and I think it's impossible to rule it out. The books were copyrighted under the name of Baroness von Ehrenfels of Austria. Did she help write or did she just help by being the front person for German publication? I don't suspect we'll ever know for sure.

Nussimbaum is a fascinating figure and Reiss has got a hold of a good topic. I do think the expansion to a book shows signs of haste: Reiss writes about the Freikorps and Walter Rathenau; interesting topics, but they don't have a whole lot to do with Nussimbaum. He writes about G. S. Viereck, the American Nazi sympathizer, who was an acquaintance of Nussimbaum,  but he kind of repeats himself. Still, a good read. And now I want to find Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient. It was the story of the Nussimbaum's escape from Baku when the Bolsheviks marched in. It was marketed as non-fiction when it came out; Reiss says it's half-fiction, but it still sounds pretty thrilling.

Reiss later went on to write The Black Count, about Alexandre Dumas' military father, which got pretty good press when it came out. I was interested in it at the time, but didn't read it, but that may change.

Both these books march around Europe, so pick a country. "The ideas you have!" said Hassa. "Nobody ever goes to Belgrade on their honeymoon." Serbia's tempting, but I'll go with Bosnia, which that honeymoon also included. A crucial scene takes place in Sarajevo, where Dr. Hassa's family is from. When Dr. Hassa and Asiadeh first meet:

"There was an Anbari who was the governor of Bosnia."

"Yes," said the girl. "That was my grandfather."

For The Orientalist, I'll say Turkey, since I've already used Azerbaijan for Ali and Nino. It was Constantinople was where Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey.