The Economist
February 12, 2005
U.S. Edition

Unreal city; The Caucasus

LIKE no other place on earth, the Azerbaijani capital of Baku
encapsulates everything about the Orient which westerners find
enticing, deceptive and spine-chilling. On a moonlit night, its
walled Persian quarter has a fairy-tale charm—but to anyone with a
vivid imagination, it often seems that a jinn or fallen angel lurks
in the shadows.

If Baku’s atmosphere seems charged, that is mainly because of the
liquid that oozes from the earth and lends its odour to the blustery
wind. Caspian oil has drawn in many faiths and cultures: Muslims,
Christians and Jews as well as Turks, Persians and Slavs. There have
been times of benign co-existence; times of wild decadence; and times
of violence between suitors for Baku’s wealth and beauty.

This is the environment which produced Lev Nussimbaum, a mysterious
literary figure whose best-known book is “Ali and Nino”, a love story
between a Muslim Azeri and a Georgian Christian. Writing as Essad Bey
and Kurban Said, he achieved literary success in fascist Europe—first
Germany and later Italy—by concealing his Jewish origins and
re-inventing himself as a Muslim prince.

Tom Reiss spent six years piecing together the story of a man who was
born in Baku in 1905 into a petro-elite whose world was wrecked by
revolutionary violence. Thanks to Mr Reiss’s detective work, it
becomes clear why Nussimbaum turned fantasy—about himself, and those
around him—into an art and a tool for survival.

The hero’s boyhood included both luxury and trauma. His father was a
well-connected tycoon, his mother a revolutionary who took her own
life when he was about seven, leaving him in the care of a German
nanny. The Muslim east was on his doorstep, but as violence raged in
the streets, the family cowered in the cellar of its mansion. Fleeing
in a camel caravan with his father across Central Asia, the young Lev
was exposed to an even more exotic world. This offered new material
for his fantasies and fresh evidence of the prudence of hiding one’s
identity. To a lady’s man, literary lion and staunch anti-communist
in Hitler’s Germany (prepared in some contexts to defend Nazism), the
need for a thick smokescreen was more obvious still. In the end, the
disguise did not quite work; his origins were denounced by his
embittered wife Erika Loewendahl, an heiress who regretted her
initial faith in his claims to be of a “princely Arab lineage”.

Mr Reiss takes the reader through his own search for the truth;
through the twists of 20th-century history in Russia and Germany, and
hence though the life-story itself. This would be hard work if the
inter-weaving of biography, investigation and geopolitics were not so
elegant.

Many a reader will wonder about the future of Baku, a century after
Lev’s birth. What new tales of clashing civilisations, and ambivalent
identities, will unfold there? The city is again experiencing an oil
boom, and again in the eye of a strategic storm. In the capital of a
fragile post-Soviet state, a noisy lobby wants war to settle scores
with the Armenians. Only if Baku’s latest suitors work hard to
preserve peace can the risk of fresh bloodshed in these haunted
streets be kept at bay.

GRAPHIC: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and
Dangerous Life.

–Boundary_(ID_kP/EBU+ekfzZ9AstHwI1Nw)–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress