Lev Nussimbaum

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

He later migrated to Baku and invested in oil.

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

Lev Nussimbaum (October 17, 1905 – August 27, 1942), 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 was born in October 1905.

He 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.

Nussimbaum's birth was originally registered in the Kyiv Synagogue.

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

Apparently, she had embraced left-wing politics and was possibly involved in the underground Communist movement.

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

In 1918, Lev and his father temporarily fled Baku because of the massacres that were taking place in the streets between different political forces.

According to Essad Bey's first book, Blood and Oil in the Orient, which historians do not consider to be very reliable, the two travelled through Turkestan and Persia.

Researchers have found no record of this adventurous journey except in Nussimbaum's own writings.

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

Nussimbaum and his father returned to Baku, but when the Bolsheviks took Baku in the spring of 1920, they fled to Georgia.

They stayed there until the Bolsheviks took Tiflis and Batumi.

Nussimbaum eventually settled in Berlin (1921–1933), where he enrolled simultaneously in high school and in Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

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

Phil.

degree.

In 1922, while living in Germany, he obtained a certificate claiming that he had converted to Islam in the presence of the imam of the Turkish embassy in Berlin.

He 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.

He wrote under the name of Essad Bey in German.

Historians and literary critics who knew these subjects well discredited Essad Bey as a reliable source.

Today, historians disregard books published under this name and rarely quote him, though the topics Essad Bey chose to write about are still critically relevant.

The fact that Essad Bey was so prolific calls into question the authorship of these books and whether Essad Bey was primarily operating as a broker and doctoring manuscripts and marketing them under his pseudonym, which had become famous.

In 1926, he began writing under the pen name of Essad Bey for the literary journal Die literarische Welt (The Literary World).

At least 120 articles were published under this name.

Lev Nussimbaum, as Essad Bey, wrote his first book Oel und Blut im Orient (Blood and Oil in the Orient) in German in 1929.

Although he claims that his account was autobiographical, historians in Azerbaijan and Georgia discount this claim, as there are many major factual errors in the historical description.

Essad Bey describes his delight when, at the age of 14, he and his father left Azerbaijan.

In the final passage of the book, he writes: "At that moment, Europe began for me. The Old East was dead."

They purportedly boarded a ship bound for Istanbul, where thousands of refugees had fled.

By the early 1930s, Essad Bey had become a popular author throughout Western Europe, writing mainly about contemporary historical and political issues.

Politically, Essad Bey was a monarchist.

In 1931, he joined the German-Russian League Against Bolshevism, the members of which, Daniel Lazare remarks, "for the most part either were Nazis or soon would be".

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

In 1934, his agent warned him to slow down and take a year off between books so that he would not appear to be so prolific.

That year no books were published in German – only two novellas in Polish.