The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life Pdf

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Account Options Sign in. Top charts. New arrivals. Tom Reiss Feb Switch to the audiobook. 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 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, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life 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. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity—until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life 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. 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. More by Tom Reiss See more. Tom Reiss. Reviews Review Policy. Published on. Flowing text. Best for. Web, Tablet, Phone, eReader. Content protection. Learn more. Flag as inappropriate. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life - Tom Reiss - Google книги

The intriguing search for the true identity of a s cult novelist published here, by Random, in whose obscure working life was based entirely on escapist subterfuge. Readers who wonder why Reiss Fuhrer-Ex was able to flesh out Nussimbaum's mysterious life after discovering a cache of Tom Reiss. 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 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 The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life 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. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity—until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. 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. 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. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss

By Tom Reiss. Random House. AN entertaining species of biography might take the generic subtitle: "But did he really exist? In each case, the biographer's task is not just telling a life story but peeling away the layers of myth and mendacity that cocoon these fabulists. Although "Kurban Said" may not have reached such extremes of fantasy, he set a high standard. During his short but amazing interwar career as a writer he became famous throughout much of Europe. His novel "Ali and Nino," a romance set in Azerbaijan at the time of the Russian Revolution, was a best seller inand is read to this day. When Tom Reiss went to report from Baku some years ago, an Iranian friend recommended it to him as better than any guidebook. Its author also published a number of books as "Essad Bey," beginning with "Blood and Oil in the Orient," written when he was only 24, and including biographies of the last czar and of Stalin. But who was he? That question set Reiss off sleuthing, and "The Orientalist" is the result. It might have been called "The Quest for Kurban. Around half a century earlier Lev's grandfather had probably migrated to the Caucasus from the Jewish Pale within the Russian Empire, and Lev's father, Abraham, had made a small fortune out of oil. One of Lev's first pieces of mythmongering was to insist that his mother was not Jewish as she doubtless was but a declassed aristocrat. He was altogether a romantic snob, who strongly identified with Nicholas II "we have the same character". In "Blood and Oil" Lev would describe himself at 13 using a machine gun during the brutal civil war that followed the revolution. That seems unlikely, but there is little doubt father and son escaped across Turkestan and Persia and endured many privations before returning to Baku. But soon the Bolsheviks and their dreaded Cheka were in control there, and the pair escaped once more, this time to Constantinople. Although Reiss's book is intermittently enthralling, he suffers from the notorious author's inability to let go of anything he has learned. Numerous digressions are more detailed than relevant, on everything from the origins of the Shiite-Sunni scission to the decay of old Turkey "I didn't know much about the Ottoman Empire when I first returned from Baku," he says in his chatty way, "but when I got back to my apartment in New York, the perfect source presented itself to me". Not all these asides have the ring of authority. Still, these are minor flaws, and the action is so gripping that Reiss is soon pulled back to spinning his yarn. But his first really successful reinvention was to shed his Russianness and become a German author. This kind of transmogrification was not so rare -- in the fullness of time, after all, Elena's brother Vladimir would become a great American writer -- and in that slightly crazy milieu, name- changing, or "guising," was almost commonplace. At any rate, there now emerged Essad Bey, a turbaned, dagger-wielding writer, an Azeri Muslim, who began contributing to literary papers and turning out books. Whatever his veracity, there is no doubting Lev's ability, precocity and sheer prolificity. After "Blood and Oil" came half a dozen more very successful books in the next four years, at least 14 in his short life, as well as a great quantity of journalism. Less productive The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life may be amused to hear The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life agent begging his client "not to publish too many more books. His performance as Essad was not just shtick, and one chapter, on "Jewish Orientalism," is far from an irrelevant digression. Reiss gives a fascinating examination of something that sprang up in the early 19th century, a romantic Jewish tradition of identifying with the East. It encompassed everything from the The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life of the mystic Orient found in Benjamin Disraeli's preposterous novel "Tancred," to the quite extraordinary architectural fashion for building synagogues in a supposedly Jewish-Muslim or "Moorish" style, often of the most outrageous extravagance I don't know if Reiss has ever seen it, but there is no more astonishing case than the wildly over-the-top synagogue in Liverpool. In this context Reiss connects Nussimbaum-Essad with some of the more exotic Zionists, who envisaged not so much a European colony on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean as a reconnection of the Jews with their Asian heritage. And yet if the Jewish boy from Baku who wanted to be a sheik of Araby fit into this pattern, he never completely shed his origins, not in the way witness-protection schemes are meant to arrange. By the early 's Lev was flirting with all sorts of harebrained zealots and crackpots, some on the far right. But if he had The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life that he was a Jew, they hadn't. In lateafter Hitler had come to power, Lev sailed for New York, maybe -- who knows if anything The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life for certain in his case? Instead, he returned to Europe inonly to learn that he had been expelled from the German Writers Union "No specific reason was given, but none needed to be" and that his wife had left him. He went to Vienna and, in the same strange pattern of paradox and denial, wrote "Allah Is Great," celebrating the Muslim resurgence of the age. The book could equally have borrowed Shelley's title, "The Revolt of Islam," or George Antonius's "Arab Awakening" -- and to make it odder still, its co-author was Wolfgang von Weisl, an associate of Vladimir Jabotinsky in the ultranationalist Revisionist Zionist movement. Now Lev moved to Italy and desperately tried to ingratiate himself with Mussolini's regime, even offering, with what Reiss calls almost suicidal chutzpah, to write a biography of Il Duce. But his timing had finally gone all wrong. Mussolini had just passed his racial laws in an opportunistic attempt to please Hitler and Lev Nussimbaum's Jewish identity was officially denounced. He managed to hide himself away in Positano, the pretty town south of Naples, pretending to be an American. Maybe the New Order would have caught up with him -- his father disappeared into the hellish darkness and was probably murdered at Treblinka -- but disease came first. Raynaud's syndrome, similar in effect to gangrene, killed him inat the age of only Whether this astounding and bitter story has any moral I am not sure, but it defies the old phrase "stranger than fiction. Who would have believed a word of it? Home Page World U.