The Orientalist

by Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss is an American author and historian. Born in 1964 in New York.

He traveled to Germany researching his family story who had escaped from nazi Europe in 1930. His maternal grand parents were deported from Paris to Auchwitz, but his mother had survived as a hidden child in France during World War II .

In 2005 he wrote the Orientalist , biography of Jewish Russian born Lev Naussim Baum.

Tom Reiss not only in this book solves the mysterious life of Lev by analyzing its detail, but more importantly he covers all the important events of the first period of the 20th century such as the Bolshevik Revolution, the migration of stateless people,  WWI, nazism, WWII.

After reading "Ali and Nino", in our group, our discussion leaded us to the life of  its fictive author, Kurban Said (Lev Naussimbaum).

Born in October 1905 from a radical Russian revolutionary mother. Son of Abraham Naussimbaum , an industrial magnate in the oil industry, immigrated to Baku.

Lev and his father Fled Bolshevik Revolution in 1920, to Constantinople and Paris , ended In Berlin in 1922. There he converted to Islam, became author and journalist under the pen name Essad bay, his other self invented identities. Published his first book Blood and Oil in the Orient. He married a Jewish heiress and went to live in New York in 1935. After their marriage fell apart, he left the State and hid in Positano, Italy writing Mussolini's biography. He died at the age of 37.

 Unlike the European Jewish interested in Orientalism (Disraeli, Vambery, Palgrave ) he was from the east. He also went even a step further and converted to Islam , liked to dress in oriental garb and acted as if life is a theater. Was he acting?

 Some questions raised during our discussion. 

Did he believe in a mixed Arab-Jewish culture? was it all the matter of surviving as a Jewish in Nazi Berlin and Mussolini's Italy.

The book was in general well appreciated by the group.

Susan Op de Beeck