The orientalist by tom reiss

The Orientalist is, in the end, the story of one man’s accidental obsessive search for another man’s story. While in Baku (present day capital of Azerbaijan) writing a story about the revival of the oil business, Tom Reiss is handed a copy of Ali and Nino by a person called “Kurban Said,” and told that this book is both the Azeri “national novel” and the best introduction to the city he could possibly have. Soon, he finds that there is a huge controversy over the identity of the author- despite the novel’s cultural importance, no one seems to really know who this “Kurban Said,” was for sure, and everyone wants to claim him for one of their own. He becomes fascinated with the mystery and embarks on a whirlwind quest to find out just who this man was.

The author identifies the author of the novel as a man born to the name of Lev Nissumbaum, born on October 17, 1905 (Alert: history buffs, you might have reason to know this date) in Baku, Tiflis, or “noplace,” depending on the version of his birth story that you believe. Lev’s own version of his birth (found in his deathbed notebooks) essentially gives the framework of his entire life, so I will reproduce a part of it here:

“Born in…? Already here the problematic nature of my existence begins. Most people can name a house or at least a place where they were born… I was born during the first Russian railroad strike in the middle of the Russian steppes between Europe and Asia, when my mother was returning from Zurich, the seat of the Russian revolutionaries, to Baku, the seat of our family. On the day of my birth, the czar proclaimed his manifesto in which he granted the Russians a political constitution. On the day of my arrival in Baku the city was engulfed in the flames of Revolution, and the slaughtering of the mob…So began my existence. Father: an industrial magnate in the oil industry; mother: a radical revolutionary.”

The story of Lev’s life as it progresses essentially does not stray very far from any of these contradictions, and he fights them out visibly and painfully in public and private, in sources Reiss has found has far ranging as American tabloids and Lev’s deathbed notebooks, written to distract himself from horrible pain. Lev starts out with a pampered childhood in Baku, the son of a privileged Jewish (as you might imagine, that will become important later) oil millionaire, a little boy who runs away to the “Arabic” quarter of the city in order to escape, and sits staring over the desert on top of old, crumbling Muslim palaces- far far away from the replica of Paris many Westernized members of society were trying to create around his home. He is eventually allowed to go to school and spends several years in his youth at a Imperial Russian run school. The young Liova conceives a fascination with everything to do with the East- Muslims, the desert, Arabic art and clothes, swords, Persian and Arabic heroic tales(“ To this day I do not know whence this feeling came...I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of Arabic edifices every night. I do know that it was the most powerful and formative feeling of my life”).

Fascinatingly, as an old lady who also lived in pre WWI Baku during the oil-boom years tells Reiss, “for a Jewish boy to assume a Muslim name and convert here in Baku would not have been anything so horrendous as it seems today… there was never anything rigid about this identity, quite the opposite. It was Bolshevism, the anti-religion of our time, that was rigid. We were simply open to the currents of the time in which we were born.” Indeed, Reiss opens up an entire place and time that was nearly forgotten, a muddled place where the strict lines of nation-states really didn’t mean very much. Near Baku, for instance, one could find an isolated German immigrant community who had created an entire replica of a Black Forest town, nomadic tribes from the desert come to trade, a community of “Wild Jews” who were not much aware that they were “Jews” in the way that Westerners thought of the concept, and, I swear to God, the red haired and blue eyed descendants of knights from the Crusades who still wore chain mail and painted crosses on their shields. In other words, the Caucuses was the dumping ground for all sorts of leftover groups no one had bothered to check up on ever again- and now here at the beginning of the 20th century these people were suddenly being found again- not at all remembering who it was they were supposed to be.

Lev and his father are forced to flee his beloved home of Baku twice, the second time never to return again, both times on account of the violence of the Russian Revolution, both times after hiding in the basement while mobs rioted overhead, fearing for their lives. He developed a hatred of revolutions from this period, all revolutions of any kind. He was terrified of them. From his point of view, Revolutions were just an excuse for mass violence, and were far too terrifyingly focused on sweeping away everything that came before it. Lev and his father flee eastward, protected by Muslim nomads, then nationalists, and then eventually coming under the protection of the Ottoman empire in its last, dying breath before the occupying forces arrive- before finally escaping into safety (and oh the irony of this later) in Paris and Germany.

Lev became a famous writer of essays on the “Orient”, passing himself off as some sort of Muslim prince (he did in fact convert to Islam at the Ottoman Embassy in Berlin, just before the Empire was officially dissolved). He joined the rebellious café society of Weimar Berlin, walking around town in full Orientalist gear- turbans, earrings, robes, swords and makeup and hobnobbing with communists, socialists, satiric cabaretists and in general all the oddballs of the Weimar era. He marries a Jewish millionaire’s daughter, spends some time in high society New York and Hollywood, getting fat and drinking away his health- and then chooses to come back to the heart of fascist Europe in the 1930s after he had already escaped to the safety of America. He called himself “Essad Bey,” now, or some hybrid of his real name and his new name “Essad Bey-Nussimbaum,” as if never quite sure how far he could really leave his past behind. But he tries very hard to hide in this persona, long before it would have become necessary due to any sort of outside forces. He told outrageous stories about his life- many of which turned out to be true in essentials. He was “exposed” many times (by “real” Muslims, by the anti-Semitic press, by rivals, by the army who didn’t like his too-truthful picture of what went on in the Caucuses while the German army was there during WWI), and yet somehow manages to carry it off, writing continually in this new persona, keeping everyone guessing as to who he really was. As anti-Semitism grew in Germany and with it the accusations of him being a “Jewish story-swindler,” Lev just kept writing- biographies (Stalin, Czar Nicholas- with whom he had a very strong identification), essays (on Muslim independence, the oil industry, and everything in between), style pieces, and eventually novels. His politics were often supported by one right-wing pre-Nazi ministry while his questionable ancestry was persecuted by another. He supported the more “moderate” form of fascism espoused by Mussolini before he radicalized, and wrote an “expose” of the Cheka, the Russian secret police of the time. His works were on the list of “approved reading” for Nazi Germany for many years into the war. When he died in Positano, Italy he died “the Muslim,” with a carved turban on top of his gravestone and his feet pointing towards Mecca.

Lev Nissumbaum spent his entire life trying to become the person that he believed that he was in the end. He spent his entire life looking back towards the past, even as a young boy, looking for a way to restore what he felt had been lost to him. He forged a new identity out of nothing but what he felt the world should look like- a romanticized portrait from his childhood that he couldn’t let go of, and he succeeded. I can’t even begin to do this book justice, writing the above hasn’t even covered a grain of what’s going on here. The issues of identity being addressed here are just mind-bogglingly amazing to engage with, and all the huge questions of the 20th century are here- how do we classify people, try to make them something else, how little choice the world gives people who want to be something else other than what the lines and borders of the modern world tell them they are meant to be. He kept on selling himself, right to the very end, like to stop selling his persona was to stop believing in it himself. There’s amazing statements here about the nature of “truth” and “truthiness”. As Reiss himself admits, the facts that you can trust least about Lev Nissumbaum are the basics for the time, “name, race, nationality.” Many of the tales Lev tells about himself are concocted, skewed, embellished… and yet never really not true. All the stories he told were about himself, even those that were ostensibly about others- the self that mattered far more than the categories that 20th century Europe made necessary for people to identify with. Only those basic facts are the real lies, the ones he felt he needed to devote a life’s work to obscuring in order to live the life that he wanted to, even before being a Jewish writer in Berlin was a real danger.

It’s just an amazing, exhilarating book from which I learned so much, a visceral experience of finding oneself seemingly literally against all the world. The Self triumphant, somehow, in a system that wants to destroy every last trace of it. I can't even express, I don't think, all that is amazing about this book. Reading this was, for me, one of those peak moments that Joseph Campbell describes when you find out that: "Ohhh.. ah.. ah.. ahh..."

Actually, weirdly, a quote from the other sort of biography I'm reading right now on Sarah Bernhardt I think explains excellently what is so captivating about Lev to me, being the way he was in the time he was it:

"Do you for a moment believe that my public wanted me to be like them? Do you think the world would have praised me to the skies if I had been just like everybody else? Really, what an absurd goal! Do you mean to say there isn't anyone among your contemporaries who would like to look like no one else on the face of the earth? No one who wants to set himself or herself apart from the common herd? Is here no one who wants to transcend the others, who wants to be adored by them, who wants to distance himself from them, and be adored by them precisely because he has distanced himself from them? What kind of time is this where everything is all blended into a meaningless nothing?

I feel sorry for you with all my heart."