23 Facts About Lev Nussimbaum

Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote under the pen names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, was a writer and journalist, born in Kiev to a Jewish family.

Lev Nussimbaum lived there and in Baku during his childhood before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14.

Lev Nussimbaum created a niche for himself in the competitive European literary world by writing about topics that Westerners, in general, knew little about - the Caucasus, the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, newly discovered oil, and Islam.

Lev Nussimbaum wrote under the name of Essad Bey in German.

Lev Nussimbaum claimed that he was born in a train.

Documents in the Kyiv State Archives and the Kyiv Synagogue state that Lev Nussimbaum was born in Kiev.

Lev Nussimbaum's father, Abraam Leybusovich Nussimbaum, was a Jew from Tiflis, in present-day Georgia, born in 1875.

Lev Nussimbaum later migrated to Baku and invested in oil.

Lev Nussimbaum's mother, Berta Basya Davidovna Slutzkin Nussimbaum according to her marriage certificate, was a Jew from Belarus.

Lev Nussimbaum committed suicide on February 16,1911 in Baku when Nussimbaum was five years old.

Lev Nussimbaum's father hired Alice Schulte, a woman of German ethnicity, to be his son's governess.

Lev Nussimbaum eventually settled in Berlin, where he enrolled simultaneously in high school and in Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat.

Lev Nussimbaum did not graduate from either school, but told people that he had received a Cand.

Lev Nussimbaum joined the Social Monarchist Party, which advocated restoration of Germany's Hohenzollern dynasty.

Lev Nussimbaum had connections to the pre-fascistic Young Russian movement, headed by Alexander Kazembek.

Erika's parents, who were wealthy, succeeded in getting the marriage to Lev Nussimbaum annulled in 1937.

In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Lev Nussimbaum fled to Italy and settled in the seacoast town of Positano.

Lev Nussimbaum died there of a rare blood disorder which causes gangrene of the extremities.

Lev Nussimbaum had a romantic view of Islam, seeing it as part of the grand cultural heritage of "the East", to which he felt connected through his Jewish heritage, and a bulwark against the evils of Western modernity and Bolshevism.

In 1924 in Berlin, Lev Nussimbaum helped found an Islamic student group Islamia, where he met other Muslims: Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Afghans and Indians, as well as converts like himself.

In 1930, Mohammed Hoffman, a member of Islamia and himself a convert to Islam, accused Lev Nussimbaum of trying "to pass for a born Muslim" and suggesting that his conversion was merely a ploy.

At one point, Lev Nussimbaum was requested to write an official biography of Benito Mussolini.

The primary author featured in this issue, Betty Blair, states that "we are convinced" that the book was written mostly by Azerbaijani author Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, though they offer evidence that Lev Nussimbaum wrote at least some portions of the book.