Kurban Said: Ali and Nino

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

The real identity of Kurban Said, the author of this 63-year-old novel, was a mystery until 1991, when a splendid piece of investigative journalism published in the New Yorker by Tom Reiss revealed him to be an Azerbaijani Jew, Lev Nussimbaum.

In 1919, when Nussimbaum was 14, his family fled Azerbaijan just ahead of the invading Bolsheviks.

When in Istanbul on the way to settle in Berlin, Nussimbaum fell in love with the Asiatic influences of the Middle East. He took the Arabic name Essad Bey and set about attempting to submerge his Jewish identity in an Arabic persona.

This became sensible at a time when his adoptive Germany fell under the power of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. In order to sell his books in an anti-Semitic German market, Nussimbaum was forced to put further distance between his Jewish self and his work by adopting the pen-name Kurban Said.

Later, he shared this pseudonym with a female acquaintance, Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, in an effort to recover some of the royalties left in his Berlin publisher's account when he was forced to flee again, this time from Nazi persecution, to Rome. For this reason - and because the notion that a German aristocrat was the real Kurban Said appealed to the Nazi authorities - it has commonly been assumed that the baroness was the author of Ali and Nino.

Set in Azerbaijan, which for Said represents the cusp of Asiatic versus European cultural influences, Ali and Nino is the story of Ali Khan, a Muslim with an aristocratic pedigree, who marries a Christian, Nino Kipiani.

This is an ill-starred romance, not only because of the religious divide. There are personal differences, symbolised by the incompatibility of Ali's love for the desert and Nino's love for the forest, and the differing expectations each brings to the marriage.

Although it seems that love will conquer even these fairly serious marital problems, there is political turmoil to be reckoned with. With the advent of the First World War the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires collide, with Azerbaijan, typically, caught in the middle. Russia eventually falls to the Bolsheviks, foreshadowing the swamping of Asiatic Azerbaijan by Russian Europeanism.

The greatest attraction of this novel is the window it gives onto a little-known (by the West) part of the world and its population. As the story rolls along we learn a great deal about Azerbaijan, the Middle East and Islam. It's like a cross between A Farewell to Arms and the Lonely Planet Guide to the Greater Middle East.

Love and its greatest of obstacles, human difference, are timeless. That's why, over half a century on, this is still a fascinating and haunting novel.

Vintage

$24.95


* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.