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intellectual love affair, and she was his
last link to the outside world. He
reveals his deep sadness that in the end
he could not protect his father, who
ultimately died in Treblinka.
Reiss was drawn to Nussimbaum's
story during a trip to Baku in 1998,
on assignment for a travel piece. A
friend recommended Ali and Nino as a
useful guide to the city. The author
named on the cover was Kurban Said,
and Reiss learned there was some dis-
agreement as to Said's true identity.
At the same time, he happened to
pick up one of Essad Bey's early books
in his hotel, a memoir and history
titled Blood and Oil in the Orient, and
he immediately saw connections
between the two works.
As he got more involved in tracking
down the truth about Nussimbaum,
the 40-year-old Reiss came to see his
subject as a character he had been
waiting his whole life to meet.
Reiss is the grandson of German
Jews who left in the 1930s, although
many relatives remained trapped in
Europe; his mother came to the
United States in 1948 as a French-
Jewish war orphan. In his early child-
hood years, Reiss lived with relatives
in the Washington Heights area of
Manhattan before his family moved to
Texas and then Massachusetts.
The book is dedicated in part to his
late great-uncle Lolek, an emigre who
would have been Nussimbaum s con-
temporary and regaled him with sto-
ries of his adventures.
Offhandedly, Reiss refers to himself
as a novelist. "That's how I write," he
says, "through the experiences of indi-
viduals. I think of myself as a novelist
who must write the truth." He adds
that he has been obsessed with facts
since childhood.
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Creative Act
If there has been a theme to Reiss's
books and articles — he wrote about
neo-Nazis in Dresden for the Wzll
Street Journal and a book called
Fzihrer-Ex on the neo-Nazi movement
in Europe — it has been "trying to
find the back door into the Jewish
experience in Nazi Europe," he says.
"I've always tried to find a way of see-
ing it that pulled me away from the
cliches of the era.
"In some ways, I'm very attracted to
the assimilated Jews of Europe," he
continues.
Reiss has come to see assimilation as
a profoundly creative act, particularly
in Nussimbaum's case. "He was a Jew
being forced to become anything else
but a Jew, forced to assimilate all the
other cultures of the world as a way of
running away from being Jewish."
In talking about his subject's capaci-
ty for self-invention, Reiss sees
Nussimbaum "as an unusually
American character for a European
Jew." Over the years, in his different
guises, he rewrote his autobiography
several times, another quality that
strikes Reiss as American.
The multicultural Nussimbaum did-
n't write directly about Zionism, but
one of his last published works, Allah
is Great: The Decline and Rise of the
Islamic Worle4 published in 1936, was
co-written with Wolfgang von Wiesl, a
leading Zionist who was Vladimir
Jabotinsky's right-hand man.
In Weimar Berlin, Nu.ssimbaum
found a number of other Jewish
writers who "sought refuge from the
new political realities in esoteric vis-
tas on sympathetic Orientalism."
They saw the Jews as mediators
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was funny. I didn't know anyone who
wasn't funny. To this day, I find my
friends as funny as they find me. The
difference was that I could organize it
on paper.
"I think there's a sound, that New
York noise, that has very, very deep
roots in traditional kinds of American
comedy," he continues. "Before our
time, on radio and television, people
like Sid Caesar set the sounds of
American comedy, and it was a sound
that was very natural to us.
"Mel Brooks and Neil Simon and
Woody Allen, even though they're of
an older generation, [what they creat-
ed] kind of became an American corn-
edy sound, and it suited us. When I
started on [television's] The Odd
Couple, it was a sound I recognized. It
was hard to do it. It's very hard to do
the craft of writing dialogue, writing
stories and writing scenes, but the
sound was very familiar to me."
If writers such as William Faulkner
and others are to be believed, screen-
writers are the pond scum of
Hollywood, the lowest rung of the
creative ladder.
"You don't have power," Ganz says.
"You accept that you don't operate
from a position of power like produc-
ers and directors and studio execu-
tives. But the truth is, we have very
TAG TEAM on page 71
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2005
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