by Tom Reiss
432pp, Chatto & Windus, £16.99
Baku, on the Azerbaijan shore of the Caspian sea, was the most modern city on earth at the beginning of the 20th century. East was outrageously east there, and west was wild, and the twain met often, their fusion fuelled by the city's power source: oil. Baku was the first petroleum metropolis. Crude, brokered by barons, financed a unique civilisation. Like everybody in the Caucasus, the barons had arrived from elsewhere to take advantage of frontier forgetfulness. Among them was Abraham Nussimbaum, one generation away from the Russian pale of Jewish settlement, and his shtetl-raised wife, whose youthful suicide was a chosen exit from the clash of her revolutionary fervour with Nussimbaum's prosperity.
She had produced a son, Lev, born aboard a strikebound train to Baku in October 1905, when riot and ruckus, provoked by Russia's massive failure in its war with Japan, were raised in the region. The Orientalist is a biography of Lev.
His childhood was a short course in reality - mother soon gone, Armenians massacred, Cossacks charging, terrorists of all and no allegiances assassinating. It was also a long dream season. When he could get out, albeit guarded against kidnap, Lev haunted the Muslim quarter and the palace of its khans, or sat on the family roof rhapsodising on fantastic desert and mountain dwellers.
Magic realism was a pragmatic response to Baku between 1905 and the 1917 revolution, and Lev was grounded in it; his belief that he could instigate marvels was confirmed, during post-Soviet exile in central Asia and Persia, by his escapes - connived yet miraculous - from Bolsheviks, bandits, buggery and bullets. Abraham and Lev were sundered and reunited, sometimes destitute, sometimes flush. Once they were housed in a cinema, because it was clean and had a loo.
Such an unsentimental education should have shaped Lev into a novelist and very eventually it did. Ali and Nino, published 1937, was the love story of a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, or, rather, the romance of Lev and vanished Baku. But the novel, which spellbound Tom Reiss in 1990s oil boomtown Baku, was credited to "Kurban Said". As Reiss slowly discovered through his original research for The Orientalist, Kurban Said was more of a fiction than Ali and Nino. Said was Lev's second self-invented persona.
He had created his first alternative identity, Essad Bey, as a pfennigless exile in Berlin in the early 1920s. (Lev and Abraham had by then scarce unpacked their suitcases in Constantinople, Rome and Paris in turn, flotsam on a first wave of asylum-seekers.) Lev attended Russian high school in the afternoon and enrolled for oriental studies at Berlin university the rest of the day. Any teen geek fantasist might have done that, but few would then have learned the languages, read the tomes, converted to Islam, with name-change, and promoted themselves as an expert Orientalist at the age of 22. Lev-Essad played a dual game from then to the end: acquaintances knew he was Lev, shabby son of Abraham, racked about rent, but they didn't contradict the mensch when he asserted he was Essad, heir of a noble Arab father and Russian aristo mother. As Essad Bey, he made a Weimar name for himself: journalist, biographer and cultural analyst, starting with Blood and Oil in the Orient. He was challenged all along as a fraud, by anti-semites and born, as opposed to born-again, Muslims.
Reiss attributes Lev's refusal to abandon the imposture to his determination not to be classified by the era's fatal racial taxonomy, and to his belief that he could imagine his way out of a locked room, even when the closed space was Nazi-dominated Europe. Perhaps Lev-Essad was even more complicated that that; he decided to return from America, where he could have stayed with his scalp-hunting wife and wealthy inlaws for long enough to have claimed permanent sanctuary from the Third Reich, screenwriting for an income as did his closest friend. (Reiss mentions Casablanca in connection with the refugee artist circuit; how much richer the movie's script would have been if the writers had known about the former Ottoman empire as well as the importance of money, papers and a ticket for the last Lisbon flight.)
For a long time, Lev-Essad fled from the freedom to tell made-up stories, other than the one about his origins. In fact, his first dozen books, including biographies of Stalin and Muhammad, were non-fiction, and in them he seems to have told fewer lies, especially to himself, than did his contemporaries.
Only when Lev's wife resented the non-Valentino aspects of Essad's sheikhdom (sexual reality was beyond his grasp), left with a rival and blabbed to the tabloids, abandoning Lev on a continent where Jews could no longer write or publish, did he formally essay fiction. And first he had to create "Kurban Said", meaning "joyful sacrifice", to write Ali and Nino, a character less a safe alias than a golem - an artificial being animated by magic, the enchantment of Baku. The invention didn't save his career, and his life was soon after forfeit to a disease that rotted him from the feet up. He languished in the half-haven of fascist Italy, proposing, until his death in Positano in 1942, to write a biography of Mussolini.
Reiss, through obsessed sleuthing, has retrieved a believable liar and revealed a secret, the last notebooks of Lev-Essad-Kurban, purportedly a novel called The Man Who Knew Nothing About Love. He decently respects the connections inconsequence can make, from the Interpol officer who hooked him on Ali and Nino to the chance arrival at his Manhattan dinnertable of the last heir to the Ottoman sultanate. And his descriptions of cities of exile resonate so in a time of transit that I hope his next book will be a history of diaspora capitals.