Random Publishing House, 2004
Illustrated. 433 pages

The Orientalist is the biography of Lev Nussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said, all who were the same person. Nussimbaum was born as a Jew in oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan in 1905. As a teenager, he had to flee the atrocities of the Russian Revolution. Still he remained enamored of the culture he left behind, converting to Islam in his 20s. He had been to Constantinople just before it became Istanbul. Settling in Germany, he wrote books under the name Essad Bey. When his books were banned because of his Jewish heritage, he switched to the pseudonym Kurban Said. It was under that name he published his masterpiece, Ali and Nino, about a love affair between a Baku boy and a Georgian girl.

Nussimbaum created several names and histories for himself and married an heiress who didn't even know his real name. He juggled the Jewish, Asian, and German aspects of his personality until he had to flee the Nazis and head for Italy, where he died from Reynaud's syndrome. Tom Reiss' unearthing of the amazing story of one man's search for identity has received positive reviews with the Miami Herald saying, "Reiss has fashioned a truly page-turning meditation on the meaning of homeland and the endless capacity of the imagination to transcend the violence of society's capricious labels."

From NY Times Book Review, William Grimes, Feb. 23, 2005

"In the cultural hothouse of Weimar Germany, few flowers bloomed quite as extravagantly as Essad Bey. His enormously popular books and articles opened a window on the Islamic world, the exotic tribes of the Caucasus and the political upheavals convulsing Russia. Ali and Nino, written under the pen name Kurban Said, enchanted readers with its depiction of Azerbaijan on the eve of the Russian revolution and its romantic story of a Muslim prince's love for a Christian girl.

For cultivated Germans, Essad Bey was the man of the East, the cosmopolitan Muslim who, in his writings, brought back treasure from the fabled lands of the caliphate. In fact, Essad Bey, the Orientalist of Tom Reiss's title, was a fictional creation. Although fond of posing for photographs in Caucasian tribal gear, or wearing a fez or turban, Germany's most beloved Muslim was actually a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum. Thereby hangs a wondrous tale, beautifully told, that took the author five years and patient detective work in 10 countries to reconstruct."

About the Author (from bookbrowse.com)

Tom Reiss has written about politics and culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.

He is credited as the co-author of the 1997 memoir, Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs of A Former Neo-Nazi by Ingo Hasselbach, in which Hasselbach, a former neo-Nazi and founder of the first neo-Nazi party in East Germany, describes the external forces that led to found his political party and the internal ones that led him away from it five years later.

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