Arts Life

Hiding In Plain Sight

"The Orientalist" tracks the tragic, tangled life of a Jewish writer constantly reinventing himself in
Islamic roles.

SAN DEE B RAWARS KY

Special to the Jewish News

L

ev Nussimbaum lived as
though life were theater,
inventing an identity, dressing
the part, shifting scenes, seeking audi-
ences everywhere. He thought he
could keep rewriting the ending,
believed he could talk his way out of
anything, including his Jewish past —
but ultimately he could not.
Nussimbaum was born in Baku,
Azerbaijan, in 1905, the son of a
Russian Jewish emigre who made a
fortune in the oil business. In a case of
hiding in plain sight, he later became
known as Essad Bey, a well-known
writer of books on Islam and global
politics, and then Kurban Said, a nov-
elist whose best-known work, Ali and
Nino, published in 1937, is still in
print.
Tom Reiss spent seven years trying
to untangle the threads of this most
unusual life. His new book is a richly
detailed biography that's also a mem-
oir of his quest and an uncommon
view into the Holocaust era.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery
of a Strange and Dangerous Life
(Random House; $25.95) makes for
fascinating reading.
From childhood, Nussimbaum day-
dreamed of the East, of Turkish war-
riors, Persian princesses and Arabic

Tag Team

Writing duo responsible
for last month's
animated hit "Robots"
and the upcoming
romantic comedy
"Fever Pitch" explain
screenwriting process.

4/7

2005

68

architecture. After the Russian
Revolution, he and his father fled
from Baku to Turkestan and then
across the desert in a 50-camel cara-
van, finally arriving in Constantinople
and then Paris. They moved to Berlin,
where he secretly attended high school
and university simultaneously, "cram-
ming his head full of the mysteries of
the East," as Reiss writes.
At a time when many European
Jews dabbled in Orientalism,
Nussimbaum went a step further and
converted to Islam. He enjoyed dress-
ing in full regalia and was celebrated
in literary and intellectual circles for
his work, publishing 16 books —
including biographies of Lenin and
Stalin — before the age of 30.
As Essad Bey, he married a Jewish
heiress, and when their marriage fell
apart in the late 1930s, the story was
reported in tabloid newspapers around
the world.
He died in Positano, Italy, in 1942
at age 36, while under house arrest;
although the courtly gentleman was
known by townspeople as the Muslim,
his Jewish identity was suspected.
He was impoverished, unable to col-
lect royalties due on his books. One of
the remaining mysteries of his life is
why he went to Italy — and offered to
write a biography of Mussolini — and
then chose to stay there, when he
might have had a chance of escaping

CURT SCHLEIER

Special to the Jewish News

owell Ganz and Mark
("Babaloo") Mandel met about
25 years ago at the Comedy
Store in • Los Angeles. It was a place
where unemployed comics and come-
dy writers hung out looking for a
chance to whine, the possibility of a
little sympathy and the opportunity to
poke fun at the working stiffs who fill
the audience.
What Ganz, 56, and Mandel, 55,
found instead was a lifetime partner-
ship that has resulted to date in 18
produced screenplays, including
Splash, Parenthood, City Slickers and

to the United States or elsewhere.
He's buried in a cliff-side ceme-
tery in Positano, the tombstone
set to face Mecca.

Researching A Life

It's no surprise that researching
a life as unusual as this one
would entail remarkable adven-
tures. Reiss, who was dogged in
his research and reporting,
traveled to 10 countries, inter-
viewing a range of relatives,
publishers, aged childhood
friends of his subject in Baku
and others who claimed to
know another author of Ali
and Nino. Doors seemed to
open to Reiss at unexpected
moments, yielding gifts.
Reiss found the woman
who took over the publish-
ing company, after the
Jewish owners were
expelled, that published
much of Nussimbaum's
work in Vienna; she had
gone to see Lev in Positano,
and returned with six small leather
notebooks in which he had handwrit-
ten his final and unpublished work,

The Man Who Knew Nothing About
Love. She kept them in a closet for
more than 50 years and presented
them to Reiss, who was then able to
fill in many gaps in the story.

Another
great discovery was a box of letters,
recording a correspondence between
Nussimbaum and Pima Andreae, an
influential Italian salon hostess who
tried to help him in Positano.
Nussimbaum was a man who never
wrote a boring letter. Theirs was an

A League of Their Own. The pair has
two films out this year: Robots, an ani-
mated feature that opened last month
and is currently in theaters, and Fever
Pitch, a romantic comedy based on a
Nick Hornby novel and starring Drew
Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, which
opens April 8.
Ironically, Ganz and Mandel's meet-
ing was less kismet than beshert.
Both men were born in the Bronx,
both vacationed in the Catskills within
a couple of blocks of each other
("We're almost certain we brushed
paths there as kids," Mandel says) and
both grew up in a Jewish environment
where being funny was the norm..
Ganz's family kept kosher in the

future screenwriter's formative years,
and he was, of course, a bar mitzvah.
Similarly, Mandel's parents were obser-
vant — at least while his grandmother
was alive — and he proudly exclaims
that all of his six children ("I stutter
when I have sex") also became b'nai
mitzvah.
But it is that uniquely Jewish sense
of humor that drives the writing duo.
"In my family, it was my dad and my
grandmother," Mandel says, "I don't
know how far back it went. Apparently,
we are all the same people."
"Nobody thought I was especially
funny," Ganz notes. "Where I grew up,
my mother, my dad, my family, the
friends I hung out with — everybody