Now Open Fridays for Lunch NMI NMI MIN MIN IMO =MI MN MI SPOSITA'S r 10° ' ° OFF RISTORANTE TOTAL FOOD BILL (MON-THURS. ONLY) PLEASE PRESENT THIS COUPON TO RECEIVE DISCOUNT! Fine Italian Dining in a Casual Atmosphere 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. ' OPEN 1 DAYS A WEEK! 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." 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Corned Beef Extra Lean Corned Beef Fresh Roasted Turkey Breast Swiss Cheese Chicken Salad Tuna Salad HIDING on page 71 V) .• or your carry-out needs. Lox n. I 911.00 lb. '10.00 lb. 5 6.25 lb. 99.00 lb. 99.00 lb. "The best tuna ish in North America." - D ETROIT FREE PRESS ^7^ Bloomfield Plaza • 6638 Telegraph & Maple • Bloomfieldl% 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 71 248.851.0313 ?"-- Ar A WAW irA ..F0A, A A AKA AAA, AAA. A r A r, ,,, A1,40, 96148Q . AM • x...pnt... • 11,1• What matters to you.... is right here in your weekly Jewish News. Call to get your issue delivered directly to your door! 248-351-5174 4/7 2005 69