Jane Merryman

Reiss, Tom. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. Random House, 2005.

            As in the best biographies, the times take center stage in The Orientalist, and what times they were. Perhaps they existed more in the fevered dreams of the vast population of Europe’s uprooted than in actuality. Nevertheless, the early decades of the twentieth century provided a splendid cauldron for brewing up biographies.

           In an improbable city lived a young man who embarked on an improbable life, mostly of his own invention. Lev Nussimbaum was, or may have been, that youth, the son of a wealthy Jewish businessman in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, an improbable country on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Baku was, during Lev’s childhood, history’s greatest oil boomtown, a mélange of Las Vegas, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and Dodge City. Identity change soon became a way of life for Lev when the violence of the First World War burst into his already fantastical world. The teenager and his father became stateless persons and fled east into the Caucasus. Without proper papers, they lived by their wits through the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution and eventually ended up in the glittering émigré cafes of Berlin, Paris, and Vienna. Hiding his true origin, Lev married wealthily and divorced scandalously. He died penniless and alone in Italy at age thirty-six.

            In the dazzle and nightmare of the Weimar Republic, Lev Nussimbaum took on, for the best European literary magazines of the day, the persona of resident Orientalist—an interpreter of exotic Asia for hip Westerners, an exemplar of the inscrutable East in the midst of European modernity. In his twenties, as Essad Bey, he wrote surprisingly mature political analysis of revolution and Islam, as well as biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Czar Nicholas II. His romantic novel, Ali and Nino, written under the name of Kurban Said, was an international best seller and is still in print. His own story is operatic—from the Russian fairy tale of act one; to act two, a cross between Cabaret and The Third Man; to a last act reminiscent of La Traviata, but without the last-minute arrival of the lover.

            The Orientalist exemplifies an unfortunate trend in which the biographer writes himself in as a major presence. At times, it seems as if Reiss has swept the contents of his filing cabinet and his own life into the computer and inserted page numbers. We go with him when he rummages in the dusty, chaotic archives of U.S. immigration on Ellis Island, which hardly seems to apply to our Orientalist, whose address in New York City was the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We go along to overstuffed, overheated Manhattan apartments where Reiss interviews octogenarian émigrés with pasts as shadowy as that of chameleon Lev. Do we need to know that our author ends up babysitting the pet cat of one of his elderly interviewees?

            Lev Nussimbaum remains as elusive as he himself probably intended, but the times—of oil barons, Cossacks, flappers, storm troopers—those were the days.

(This review originally appeared in the Redwood Coast Review.)