LITERATURE: Tom Reiss, The Orientalist ... Solving The Mystery Of Strange And Dangerous Life. (tomreiss.info)

Story: The true story of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as "Essad Bey" and "Kurban Said," became a celebrated adventurer and author of the enduring novel Ali and Nino.
But his success shielded a fatal secret...

NEWS: Read about how The Orientalist has just inspired Christian Louboutin to go to Caucasia.
Der Spiegel devotes three pages to Der Orientalist which was published to widespread acclaim in Germany this spring.
Watch a short BBC documentary about The Orientalist
Listen to Tom on NPR's All Things Considered.
Read The Orientalist? Write about your reading experience on the book's Amazon webpage.
Read the entire first three notebooks of Lev Nussimbaum: Notebook1 ; Notebook2 , Notebook3

The Author: Tom Reiss has written about politics and culture for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Tom is currently writing a biography of General Alexandre Dumas, the father of the famous novelist, who rose from slavery to become a leading general in Napoleon’s army -- the highest ranking black military figure in history until Colin Powell, 200 years later. Dumas went to Egypt as cavalry commander but his rivalry with Napoleon ultimately left him in an Italian dungeon. His exploits were memorialized by his son, in books like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Tom Reiss writes about international politics and culture for The New Yorker magazine. In the past, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His work often focuses on how individual lives are affected by history, and is known for its rich juxtapositions of cultures and time periods that bring forgotten people and places to life. He was born in New York City and grew up in Texas and Massachusetts, where he graduated from Harvard College. A 1998 travel magazine assignment in Baku, Azerbaijan, led him to discover the unsolved mystery of Kurban Said.

Watch a short BBC documentary about The Orientalist
Listen to Tom on NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.


The Book: 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 origins. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–scrawled in tiny print in 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 and surreal, 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.

Lev's world >>>

Read The Orientalist? Write about your reading experience on the book's Amazon webpage.
Contact the author:
Email: tom@theorientalist.info
Snail mail:
Tom Reissc/o Svetlana Katz
Janklow & Nesbit Associates
445 Park Ave, 13th Floor
New York
NY 10022-2606
Contact the webmaster: webmaster@theorientalist.info