The Orientalist

Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
Tom Reiss
Biography/Cultural History
Random House, February 2005
464 pp.

Rights have sold to:
Anagrama (Spain)
Gyldendal (Norway)
Oceanida (Greece)
Chatto (UK)
Ullstein (Germany)
de Bezige Bij (The Netherlands)
Garzanti (Italy)


Book description:
Part history, part biography, part detective story, The Orientalist brilliantly traces the life of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany.

The labyrinth of Lev Nussimbaum’s short life takes the reader into a forgotten world that existed between East and West, Muslim and Jew, during the darkest moments of the last century. 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, he became celebrated across fascist Europe even as Goebbels was systematically purging Jewish writers from Germany. 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.

Lev 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 was the leading Nazi apologist in the United States, George Sylvester Viereck, who turned out to be a friend of both Freud’s and Einstein’s. Lev was invited to be Mussolini’s official biographer–until the Gestapo got in the way.

Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and deathbed manuscripts. Beginning with a yearlong investigation that resulted in a New Yorker magazine article, he pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal–and sometimes as heartbreaking–as his subject’s life. Reiss’s quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir to 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 reconstructs the pieces of this deliberately obscured life, Reiss enters a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been virtually forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth 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.

Praise:
“Mixing memory with desire, this marvelous and original book once more reminds us of ways through which the imagination becomes a refuge from the uncontrollable cruelties of reality.”
–AZAR NAFISI, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran


About the author:
TOM REISS grew up in Texas and Massachusetts and was educated at Harvard. He has written about politics and culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.