Archives for February 2007

I just finished Tom Reiss’s The Orientalist, a book I had been eager to read ever since learning that it existed—I’ve loved Ali and Nino for years (it was the subject of one of my first LH posts), and Reiss’s 1999 New Yorker article “The Man From the East” whetted my appetite for more about Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote the novel under the pseudonym Kurban Said in Vienna in 1937. He did a lot more research after the article came out and scored some lucky interviews with nonagenarians who’d known Lev or his family, and the book is enlightening, gripping, and very much worth your while. (Furthermore, it has a very well done website, with lots of pictures.)

I emphasize that because I’m going to spend the rest of this post complaining about it, and I wouldn’t want you to think this was comparable to my blasts at David Brewer or Simon Winchester, which were designed to discourage anyone from suffering through the books involved. No, this is a fine book that anyone who is interested in quirky personalities, the fate of rootless cosmopolitans in the Europe of the 1930s, or of course Ali and Nino will certainly enjoy. But it could have been better, and I’m going to explain why.

Basically, it’s suffering from excessive ambition on the author’s part and insufficient attention on the publisher’s part. This is a classic example of a book that needed the kind of detailed, knowledgeable editing publishers no longer provide. I can understand why Reiss wanted to widen the scope and talk not just about Nussinbaum’s life but about the historical events that determined its course: the Russian revolutions (he was born during the 1905 one and had to flee Baku after the October 1917 one), the Kemalist uprising that drove him (and many other non-Turks) out of Constantinople in the early ’20s, the rise of Nazism, and so on. The problem is that he simply doesn’t know enough to do a good job. He’s a reporter, not a historian; he’s great at unearthing documents and getting people to talk, but his instinct is to tell a clear, easy-to-follow story, and history doesn’t provide many such. Furthermore, he’s completely dependent on his sources; when he has a good one, like Philip Mansel’s Constantinople: city of the world’s desire, 1453-1924 for late Ottoman Constantinople, he does a good job, but when he depends on random interviews, memoirs, and so on, not to mention Nussimbaum’s own throughly unreliable novelized autobiography, he gives simplistic accounts riddled with errors.

Examples: On p. 42, he says “In August 1914, the czarist state mobilized its vast army—the largest in the world—and swept westward, gloriously defeating Austrian forces in some of the first great battles of the First World War. But by the end of Lev’s first year at the Imperial Russian Gymnasium, the Germans had turned Russia’s spectacular advances into a rout reminiscent of the debacle against Japan nine years earlier.” This exactly reverses the situation: the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg (in which Russia’s 2nd Army was wiped out by the Germans) took place at the same time as the defeat of the Austrians, the last few days of August, but it was the latter (especially the capture of Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv) that mitigated the sting of the former. On p. 130 he describes the October Revolution thus: “While Lenin rallied his commissars, Trotsky led a ruthless attack with armored cars, machine guns, and artillery on the new democratic government offices in the Winter Palace” and adds in a footnote “The defenders of Russian democracy that day happened to be one of Russia’s first all-female army detachments, stationed around the palace in a largely formal capacity; the Bolshevik machine gunners made short work of them.” This is so bizarre I can only imagine his research consisted of watching old movies (there are no sources given in the Notes at the end); in fact, after a desultory bombardment that did hardly any damage, the Bolsheviks basically strolled into the Palace and marched the hapless ministers out. (I’ve never understood, by the way, what on earth those ministers thought they were doing sitting around the Winter Palace all day, waiting for the barbarians; you’d think they’d have either tried to organize a real defense or, like Kerensky, left town.)

When Lev and his father flee Baku in the summer of 1918, they do so by boat, crossing the Caspian and landing at a port town Reiss calls “Kizel-Su.” I presume he takes this term from Nussimbaum’s memoirs, but there is no such town on the map. He does provide a footnote saying “Kizel-Su is now Turkmenbashi, in the post-Soviet state of Turkmenistan,” but the town was not called Kizel-Su (or, in a more accurate orthography, Kyzyl-Su) before its megalomaniacal renaming, it was called Krasnovodsk. Yes, Krasnovodsk is the Russian translation of a preexisting Turkic name Kyzyl-Su ‘red water,’ but so what? That quaint local name does readers no good; it gives them an exotic frisson at the cost of making it more difficult to figure out what’s going on. This is a problem throughout—on p. 96 he refers to the “Jezids,” which is a cropped form of the Teutonic version of Yazidis, a (mostly Kurdish) Middle Eastern sect frequently known by the misnomer “devil worshippers.” They’re a fascinating group, but if you google Reiss’s term you won’t find anything but references to his book and a bunch of German pages. (This is the same uncritical use of German orthography I complained about here.)

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