The Orientalist

Lev Nussimbaum was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Baku, a boomtown of oil and empire on the edge of Europe and Asia. When the Russian Revolution broke over his world, he fled across the Caucasus by camel caravan. He eventually landed in Germany, where he reinvented himself as Essad Bey, a Muslim prince of the East, and built a public life around that persona.

Under that name he became a celebrated writer in the years when Nazism was rising. His books included the novel Ali and Nino, which is still read today. He was also a restless adventurer whose exploits earned him comparison to a real-life Indiana Jones. Behind the glamour, though, he carried a secret that put his life in danger and that, in the end, he could not outrun.

Tom Reiss tells this story as a work of biography and detective work at once. His search for the real Lev took him through ten countries, and along the way he met people and situations as dramatic, strange, and sometimes heartbreaking as the life he was tracing. The result is a sweeping account of identity, disguise, and survival in one of the darkest stretches of the twentieth century.