The Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (Audible Audio Edition) Tom Reiss Paul Michael Random House Audio Books
Download As PDF : The Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (Audible Audio Edition) Tom Reiss Paul Michael Random House Audio Books
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 identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book - discovered in a 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 10 countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject's life. Reiss' 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 depiction of the 20th 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.
The Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (Audible Audio Edition) Tom Reiss Paul Michael Random House Audio Books
An absolutely fascinating book. For an outline, I suggest you refer to other reviews. What impressed me so much - history buff I am - is the incredible wealth of historic information, from a vivid description of Baku as perhaps the earliest oil-boomtown in history,through a great many different revolutions in Russia and neighboring countries in the Caucasus (first under the Tsars and later the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), the Habsburg Empire, Germany, Italy and the Ottoman Empire - in the early twentieth century, during and shortly after the end of WW I and between wars. We get detailed information about the rise of Lenin, Stalin, Attatürk, Hitler, Mussolin,i about the life of the Russian Emigrés in Paris, Prague and Berlin, about life in early Nazi Germany for Germans as well as for Jews (Germans as well as from the Russian-Polish Pale of Settlement).All this is knowledge is imparted in a non-put-downable true but incredible and unbelievably colorful life story of a of Baku-born Jew, son of an Azeri oil magnate father and an early Russian Bolshevik revolutionary mother who, during his lifetime, re-invented himself as a Muslim prince and Orientalist who, having emigrated under incredibly dangerous circumstances, through the Caucasus, via Central Asia, Persia, Constantinople, Paris, New York, North Germany and finally Berlin, became a famous writer who sold his books in many languages including German. Incredibly, as a Jew he became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany. .Through the highs and lows of his life, he wrote famous novels like "Ali and Nino" (never out of print until today!), but also early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini. He finally died nearly pennyless in Positano in Nazi-controlled Italy in 1942, miraculously still unharmed from fascist or nazi persecution. A very interesting and enjoyable read.
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The Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (Audible Audio Edition) Tom Reiss Paul Michael Random House Audio Books Reviews
Fascinating! I had to keep Google handy all the way through, as there were so many new names, places, concepts. Not a quick read by any means, but worth it. Lev Nussimbaum - Essad Bey - Kurban Said was a truly intriguing man. A Jew who became Muslim, from Baku, Azarbaijan, and fled various political aggressions, which led to him changing his identity. He came into contact with many famous people who influenced his life, including artists, writers & powerful political figures, & ended up in Nazi Germany as Hitler came to power. It was not an easy read, but I love to learn - and I surely did!
Lev's entire, albeit brief, life is fascinating and Tom Reiss does a superb job of researching and presenting it. I had long wondered about the "real" author of Ali and Nino since no such person named Kurban Said ever stepped forward to claim authorship. It now seems evident that Lev, a strange and brilliant Jewish Orientalist, deserves the credit. However, while the subject matter is intriguing, Reiss's writing style can be circuitous, his sentences are complex, often with many thoughts linked together in such a way that that it necessitates the patient rereading a sentence or entire paragraph and he frequently refers to people who might not be familiar to Western readers today (e.g., fortunately I learned in a college philosophy course who Martin Buber was). In other words, this is not an easy book to read, even though it is historically accurate and the meat of the story, complete with reproductions of old photographs, is truly riveting.
As an aside There is a very good movie entitled "Baku - The City of Ali and Nino." If you are drawn to this story as much as I am, it would be well worth it to track down this film, which puts the entire novel in its geographical and historical context.
This story opened up a new aspect of Jewish history of wish I was previously unaware. Lev Nussimbaum's involvement in so many of the tumult that took place in Russia and Europe during the years it covers is extraordinary. Sadly, the book also reveals how deeply seated anti-Semitism was everywhere this unusual person went. Bolsheviks blamed the world's ills on Jewish capitalists. Pre-Nazi fascists blamed Bolshevism on the Jews. Capitalists simply turned their backs on Jews. And he felt it all, no matter how hard he tried to reinvent himself.
Lev Nussimbaurm is not particularly likable, but I have to respect his intelligence; and I can't imagine how I would have dealt with the challenging circumstances within which he found himself. He is flawed, like all of us. He was bright yet naive. He was hopeful at the wrong times. HIs fears lead him to be blind to the dangers of certain ideologies.
My one criticism of the book was that the author could have found a better way to help the reader keep track of some of the many characters who come in and out of Lev's life, and then resurface later.
Tom Reiss's book, "The Orientalist Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life", is the very strange story of author Lev Nussembaum and his identity, which has been obscured through the 20th century. It is also the story of Tom Reiss's search for that story and is, at times, as much about the "hunter" as the "hunted".
Lev Nussembaum was, at various times in his life, a Jew, a Muslim, and a hybrid. It seemed to depend on where he was living at the time and what he wanted to write. Born to Jewish parents in the oil capitol of Baku, he changed identities as often, it seems, as he changed clothing. Certainly the political extingencies of the times - the Russian Revolution, Nazism, Bolshevism - that Lev lived through, called for a somewhat "flexible" identity.
Tom Reiss began searching for Lev Nissembaum when he began searching for the author of "Ali and Nino", reputed to be one Kurban Said. Long years of searching and interviewing led to Lev Nissembaum, who had died in 1942. Reis's book is a long, sometimes repetitive, but always interesting look at foreign places and wars and how they led to Lev Nissembaum.
An absolutely fascinating book. For an outline, I suggest you refer to other reviews. What impressed me so much - history buff I am - is the incredible wealth of historic information, from a vivid description of Baku as perhaps the earliest oil-boomtown in history,through a great many different revolutions in Russia and neighboring countries in the Caucasus (first under the Tsars and later the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), the Habsburg Empire, Germany, Italy and the Ottoman Empire - in the early twentieth century, during and shortly after the end of WW I and between wars. We get detailed information about the rise of Lenin, Stalin, Attatürk, Hitler, Mussolin,i about the life of the Russian Emigrés in Paris, Prague and Berlin, about life in early Nazi Germany for Germans as well as for Jews (Germans as well as from the Russian-Polish Pale of Settlement).
All this is knowledge is imparted in a non-put-downable true but incredible and unbelievably colorful life story of a of Baku-born Jew, son of an Azeri oil magnate father and an early Russian Bolshevik revolutionary mother who, during his lifetime, re-invented himself as a Muslim prince and Orientalist who, having emigrated under incredibly dangerous circumstances, through the Caucasus, via Central Asia, Persia, Constantinople, Paris, New York, North Germany and finally Berlin, became a famous writer who sold his books in many languages including German. Incredibly, as a Jew he became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany. .Through the highs and lows of his life, he wrote famous novels like "Ali and Nino" (never out of print until today!), but also early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini. He finally died nearly pennyless in Positano in Nazi-controlled Italy in 1942, miraculously still unharmed from fascist or nazi persecution. A very interesting and enjoyable read.
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