By Tom Reiss

Half background, half cultural biography, and half literary secret, The Orientalist lines the lifetime of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who reworked himself right into a Muslim prince and have become a best-selling writer in Nazi Germany.

Born in 1905 to a prosperous kinfolk within the oil-boom urban of Baku, on the fringe of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He came upon safe haven in Germany, the place, writing below the names Essad Bey and Kurban stated, his awesome books approximately Islam, wilderness adventures, and international revolution, turned celebrated throughout fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino–a tale of affection throughout ethnic and non secular barriers, released at the eve of the Holocaust–is nonetheless in print today.

But Lev's lifestyles grew wilder than his wildest tales. He married a global heiress who had no notion of his precise identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest pal in manhattan, George Sylvester Viereck–also a pal of either Freud's and Einstein's–was arrested because the major Nazi agent within the usa. Lev was once invited to be Mussolini's professional biographer–until the Fascists found his "true" id. less than condo arrest within the Amalfi cliff city of Positano, Lev wrote his final book–discovered in a part a dozen notebooks by no means earlier than learn via anyone–helped through a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.
Tom Reiss spent 5 years monitoring down mystery police documents, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. starting with a yearlong research for the recent Yorker, he pursued Lev's tale throughout ten international locations and located himself stuck up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and occasionally as heartbreaking, as his subject's existence. Reiss's quest for the reality buffets him from one bizarre personality to the following: from the final inheritor of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian citadel, to an getting older starlet in a Hollywood bungalow filled with cats and turtles.
As he tracks down the items of Lev Nussimbaum's intentionally obscured lifestyles, Reiss discovers a chain of shadowy worlds–of ecu pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi ebook smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have additionally been forgotten. the result's a completely unforeseen photo of the 20th century–of the origins of our rules approximately race and spiritual self-definition, and of the roots of recent fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with ask yourself, The Orientalist is an outstanding booklet.