Lionel Kochan
Quite A Turk
The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West
By Tom Reiss
Chatto & Windus 433pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
From caravan outpost to the world’s oil capital: this was the fate of Baku (Azerbaijan) in the late nineteenth century, a transformation which took not much more than one generation. The sudden accretion of wealth and prominence gave rise to a profusion of extravagant characters as well as notable buildings – mosques, Zoroastrian temples, casinos, Moorish palaces, theatres, rococo pavilions, and palace gardens. In strictly human terms, oil-rich Baku spawned no more extravagant personality than Lev Nussimbaum, aka Essad Bey, aka Kurban Said. He was born into a wealthy Russian-Jewish family and developed into a picaresque man of letters, historian and political analyst, whose life was intertwined with some of the most vital elements in twentieth-century culture.
His father, Abraham Nussimbaum, was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in the Caucasus. His parents came originally from Kiev, or maybe Odessa, and were attracted to the Caucasus by the rare degree of tolerance that Jews enjoyed there, in contrast to the rest of the Tsarist Empire. The
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german