THE ORIENTALIST
Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
By Tom Reiss
Random House. 433 pp. $25.95
Some writers have long known something about the part of the world that used to be the Soviet Union: Anyone over a certain age has stories. These are stories that span decades filled with wars, privation, danger, adventure, risk and passion on a scale all but unimaginable in the contemporary world. A journalist who happened to tease out even a small portion of an old person's memories of life under the czar, the Soviets or any of the in-between regimes has invariably been impressed by the sheer density of improbable adventures and the mind-boggling extent of grief and loss. That these stories ought to be written down before the last of the elders disappears is a commonplace understanding here, but only a few writers have attempted the feat.
Journalist Tom Reiss traveled to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to write about the Caspian oil boom. He came across a novel set in pre-revolutionary Baku and then a nonfiction book -- apparently by the same author -- titled "Blood and Oil in the Orient," and finally two sisters in their nineties who remembered the author of those books as a very smart boy. These clues allowed Reiss to start reconstructing the story of Lev Nussimbaum, a story wild and improbable even by the region's standards.
Born in 1905 somewhere -- the author was never able to determine precisely where -- in the vicinity of Baku, Nussimbaum was the only son of a wealthy Jewish oilman and, apparently, an ardent revolutionary from the Pale, where most of the Jews of the Russian empire were consigned to live in poverty. His mother killed herself when he was a child, several years before the Bolshevik Revolution of which she dreamed brought her family to ruin. Lev and his father, Abraham, had to flee Baku, return and flee again, traveling separately and together, by foot, ship and camel caravan, ultimately arriving in Berlin in 1921 by way of Constantinople and Paris. In Berlin, Lev Nussimbaum gradually forged a new identity as a Muslim prince and a bestselling -- and preternaturally prolific -- author. Before his death at 37, he had published 16 books of fiction and nonfiction -- the latter apparently replete with both the most accurate of detail and the most fanciful of fantasies (for example, he made up an entire city-state in the Caucasus when his rhetoric required it) -- and made friends among the most influential of fascists.
Reiss exhibits the reporter's rare, admirable and enviable trait of unfailingly pulling at every single string that presents itself, starting with a book bought in a hotel lobby and ending with an accidental New York dinner companion who happened to be an indispensable source of information on early-20th-century Turkey. But the author's insistence on chasing every lead to the end is ultimately the book's downfall: The story of Lev Nussimbaum, also known as Essad Bey, also known as Kurban Said, drowns in the details, the asides that go on for pages and pages, and the footnotes that are sometimes barely shorter than the asides -- and notably longer than the quotes from the hero's own work. A reader may frequently be moved in exasperation to demand that the author stop crowding out his hero with unnecessary information and let him speak for himself.
For Nussimbaum seems to have been a truly gifted writer. His novel "Ali and Nino," the story of a love affair between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, is held up by modern-day Azeris as their national novel. His "Blood and Oil" was a literary hit throughout Western Europe. His biography of Stalin not only was hailed as brilliant by contemporary reviewers but also was apparently prescient in predicting -- in the early 1930s -- Stalin's long and bloody reign. Combined with Nussimbaum's excess of life experience, his talent yielded chilling prose:
"Local carts were squeaking through the empty streets. One, two, three, an entire caravan loaded with corpses. People. Corpses with severed limbs, dripping with blood, mangled by the savage hate of the enemies. The hands and feet of some of them hung over the sides of the carts. The movements of the carts made the limbs jiggle. It seemed as though they were still alive, with noses and eyes gouged out. . . . Even the faces of the cart drivers gazed out like those of corpses."
This is Lev describing what he saw, at the age of 12, when he emerged from the cellar of his father's mansion in Baku after hiding there for three days. The passage apparently comes from his deathbed notebooks, to which Reiss gained access. One wishes to read more, much more of them -- perhaps accompanied by Reiss's learned footnotes, but not by what Reiss places right after the above passage: "Whenever I consider Lev and his father hiding in the basement of the mansion, I think of the fate of another oil baron who did not go into his cellar. On our tour of Baku's grand houses, Fuad had shown me a building nicknamed the Wedding Palace." Reiss's problem seems to be precisely that he is always also thinking of someone else and someplace else -- and stuffing his prose full of names and stories that are at best tangential to the one he purports to tell.
Because he casts his net so wide, Reiss also inevitably falls into the dilettante's trap: Although his grasp of 20th-century European history is impressive, his book is riddled with anachronisms and small reporting errors. None of this would be very important if not for the sheer volume of information he packs into 433 pages.The extraneous detail gets in the way not only of Nussimbaum's fascinating story but also of the contextual information that really would illuminate it. Reiss argues that his book's hero represented a forgotten but resonant culture of Jewish Orientalism, which included Benjamin Disraeli, Arminius Vambery and other West European Jews who were fascinated with the links between Jews and the Muslim Orient. The story of Jewish Orientalism is one of the best told among the many historical excursions in Reiss's book -- but it doesn't come until Page 227. Unfortunately, the reader who comes to this volume expecting an engaging story of a remarkable life is likely to have given up by this point.
