the orientalist

Is its leaf one self-divided
Forked into a shape of strife?
Or have the two of them decided
On a symbiotic life?

I am single, I am double.
-----Ginkgo Biloba, Goethe.

This book, like its main protagonist, contains at least two stories in one. Ostensibly it is about the collapse of the old familiar European world and the birth of the historical and political movements that would shape our century. But at its heart is the tale of a wandering Jew and a love story.

Early on in this compelling book Reiss writes of how Lev Nussimbaum (aka. Essad Bey, aka. Kurban Said) despairs over the forces of revolutionary change-Bolshevism- that began by transforming the human face into a grimace. For a man so obsessed with masks and shifting identites this is a telling comment.

The life and times we are drawn into -brilliantly retold by Reiss- is the story of the escape and exile of the prolific and bizarre writer, Lev Nussimbaum. The world into which he is born into is one that will become hardly recognizable as it is increasingly determined by History and Biology (Communism and Fascism), the ideologies of class and race that would devastate the continent. Lev, like all escape artists, seeks to avoid any such fixing of identities or loyalties and this is what makes him such a complex character.

Along this journey from the 'wild west', oil-rich city of Baku to the cabaret and coffee-house culture of Weimar Germany we are introduced through a series of sketches to a whole host of strange and eccentric characters: Viereck, the writer and Nazi sympathizer, Ernst 'Putzi' , Hitler's Harvard-educated press secretary, Baron Omar-Rolf, Erika Lowendahl, a Jazz-age poetess whom Lev marries, Varian Fry whose mission it is to save two hundred of Europe's top intellectuals and artists from the grip of the Nazis and Italo Balbo, founder of the Italian Air Force who sets up a futurist experiment in the deserts of Libya.

But the real star of the story is, of course, Lev and this is in no small part due to the fact that the protean , ambiguous nature of his character deeply resonates with our modern sensibilities. Was he a Jew or a Muslim, a supporter of Mussolini or of the monarchy, a traditionalist or just a hopeless dreamer?

There is no doubt that Lev felt pangs of nostalgia for the old world; this is made clear in some intriguing chapters where his enthusiasm for the 'wild jews' of the Caucasus or his admiration for the silent infinites of the Turkmenistan desert , or his love affair with the lost splendour, the "fallen greatness" of the muslim world are made apparent.

But he was, if anything, a revolutionary conservative whose place was the "radical centre" and not on either 'side' of the 'left'/'right' divide that would tear Europe apart. In the collision of the old and new worlds, East and West, perhaps Lev's charm was in that his real loyalty was to his imagination.

As a Jew Lev must have felt the world closing in on him with the advancement of the totalitarian nightmare. Reiss doesn't cover much new ground here but it is interesting nevertheless. In some sense, Lev's partiality to monarchism was understandable. The Empires-by their sheer persistence over time- came to represent the natural order of things, a relaxed tolerance toward difference (Constantinople being the best example here) and a space where "one could be left alone". If anything, it was modern totalitarinaism with its absolute power to define people that was the 'closed world'. Indeed, Lev's nostalgia for the passing world is that for "the best face of Europe which was a radiant, carefree, cultivated countenance..light as a feather."

There a number of parallel stories running through this book and they raise issues that will strike us as of immediate relevance. For example, amongst the array of details that Reiss weaves into the narrative is the growth of the Freikorps who with their anarchic violence are the precursors to the revolutionary insurgents that we have become all too accustomed to in this day and age. We also come across Russian emigres and instinctively wonder what would have happened had the 'beautiful souls' won and not the Marxists. The latter represented, in some sense, another victory of the west (materialism) over "the East". Equally troubling is the portrait of the nihilism and aimlessness in German cities. This is a point that the anthropolgist Hugh Brody and the sociologist Z. Bauman would agree upon: in an age of liquid modernity it is the city dwellers with all of their restlessness who are the new nomads.

And when we read of the Emergency Act of 1919 to counter-act the 'threat from the East' we are immediately drawn to the State of Exception in our own times.

At the centre of this book, then, is the remarkable and captivating story of a person who has deep sympathies-like other Jewish orientalists- with the profound pluralism of the old world (European and Muslim, East and West). Perhaps this is a story for our times. In a world that is increasingly being driven into exclusivities: 'us or them', perhaps the story of Lev offers the opportunity of bridging such artifical divides...us and them perhaps?

But even if we put the politics of it to one side we are left with an account of a dazzling style of soul. It is what Reiss calls 'Zweieinsanikeit'- "grace-filled dual solitude".

I think back to those last days of Lev and imagine him writing frenetically, half-crazed by the excruciating pain of his illness, the morphine, and the desire to tell his story in his own words. Already an old man in a new world, a world where the spirit of the times looked to the past with a venomous hatred. And I picture him looking down below at the fishermen with their fixed routines and their immemorial ways that have existed since time out of mind. I can sense the growing unease, the gloom that presses heavily on his shoulders as the classical world behind him disintegrates, the centuries-old traditions of civility and restraint on the verge of going up in the blaze of collective madness that is sweeping across Europe. An unimaginable blackness that is no match to his illness.

But then he looks across the open seas and knows that there is a mystical union between sea and desert. And he is drawn to it. He feels safer here than any European does within his four walls....to get lost in the desert, to lose the way once entered upon, is impossible for infinite distances he feels a contact between himself and all the oases and clans....

-----http://www.theorientalist.info/