Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Lev Nussimbaum (aka Kurban Said) – A Jewish writer who converted to Islam and wrote a bestselling Azerbaijani romance

In 1938, in the waning twilight of a Europe hurtling toward collapse, a novel titled Ali and Nino appeared in Vienna under the name Kurban Said. It was a strange book — a breathless, cross-cultural romance set in Azerbaijan, soaked in the heat and dust of Baku oil fields, told through the eyes of a Muslim boy and his Christian Georgian beloved. It was part Romeo and Juliet, part Orientalist fever dream. Critics loved it. Readers adored it. Few asked who had actually written it.

Behind Kurban Said stood a man who had already died a thousand deaths. A Jew who became a Muslim. A cosmopolitan trapped in exile. A bestselling Azerbaijani author who had never quite belonged to Azerbaijan. A man who turned his life into a labyrinth and then lost the thread himself. His name — the real one — was Lev Nussimbaum.

Let’s begin not at the beginning, but in the middle. Vienna, again. A boy in tailored suits, too elegant for the times, limps into a café. He walks with a cane not from age but from a rare illness — Raynaud’s disease, a curse that slowly strangles the blood supply to the limbs. He looks like a young prince fallen on hard times. Thin. Pale. Always overdressed. A tragic dandy in exile. This is Lev — or Ali, or Essad Bey, or Kurban Said, depending on the day. He orders coffee, pulls out a pen, and writes furiously in longhand. In German. Always German.

His biography was already a work of fiction by then.

Lev Nussimbaum was born in 1905 in Kyiv, in the dying Russian Empire, to a Jewish oil baron father and a mother who would die by suicide when he was a child. The family fled Bolshevik chaos in 1917 and settled in Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan, before escaping again when the Red Army came for that, too. By the time Lev turned 14, he had seen two revolutions, two exoduses, and enough blood to fill a novel.

And then, a transformation: he converted to Islam at 15, allegedly in a Turkish mosque, reinventing himself as Essad Bey. Whether it was spiritual longing, cultural fantasy, or a calculated shield against rising anti-Semitism — maybe all three — no one knows. What’s certain is that he leaned into it hard. He wore flowing caftans. Spoke Arabic. Collected daggers. Claimed to be the son of an Azerbaijani nobleman. He told dinner guests he was descended from the Prophet. He was like a character out of his own unwritten novel. He may, in fact, have been.

He landed in Berlin during its decadent, freewheeling 1920s golden age — the last gasps of a doomed Weimar Republic. There, under the name Essad Bey, he began writing. Fast. Voraciously. Biographies of Stalin and Mohammed. A splashy take on Nicholas II. Orientalist epics dripping in perfume and propaganda. His prose was lush, a little breathless, sometimes factually ridiculous. But readers didn’t care. He was selling. He had found his audience.

And yet — there’s always a yet — Berlin was not safe for long. As the Nazis rose, Jewish writers disappeared, one by one. Lev stayed. Perhaps he believed his new identity could save him. Perhaps he was too proud to run again. Perhaps he didn’t believe fascism could last.

He was wrong.

In 1933, with Hitler in power, Lev was officially banned from publishing in Germany. But not before a young Jewish publisher named E.P. Tal collected a strange manuscript. It was called Ali and Nino — and its author, curiously, was not Essad Bey but someone named Kurban Said.

To this day, the true authorship of Ali and Nino remains a scholarly battleground. Some credit Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, an Azerbaijani writer who had died in a Soviet prison camp. Others believe Nussimbaum was the sole or primary author, disguising himself yet again — this time not just as a Muslim prince, but as a Muslim writer of Muslim love stories. A literary double-blind.

Whoever wrote it, the book radiates the fever-dream nostalgia of exile. It is filled with longing — for homeland, for identity, for the clarity of love in a world tearing itself apart. The protagonist, Ali, is Lev in all but name: torn between cultures, desperate to belong, always on the verge of being unmasked.

By the late 1930s, Lev was sick. His hands had begun to blacken. The disease was progressing. He moved to Positano, Italy — a steep, sleepy coastal village with lemon groves and deathly quiet mornings. He wrote letters asking for help, for money, for morphine. He couldn’t walk. Could barely write. But he clung to elegance, even then. There are stories — likely true — of him having silk shirts delivered from Milan. Of dictating letters with a smile as his fingers turned to bone. Of charming guests with poetry while hiding gangrene beneath the tablecloth.

In 1942, he died alone, in a rented villa, under Fascist surveillance. No family. No funeral. Just a few forgotten manuscripts, and a growing mystery.

Today, Ali and Nino is considered a classic of world literature. It’s taught in universities, quoted in wedding toasts, etched into the cultural memory of Azerbaijan, where it’s treated as a kind of national epic. But the man who likely wrote it — who dreamed it into being from a fevered memory of Baku — is still a ghost. Lev Nussimbaum, Essad Bey, Kurban Said. A Jewish boy from Kyiv who became a Muslim aristocrat in Berlin and died a forgotten author in Italy.

There’s a photograph of him — black and white, of course — sitting stiffly in a garden chair, dressed in a tailored white suit, shoes polished, eyes haunted. He looks like he knows he’s disappearing. Like he’s halfway through writing the last chapter of his life and trying to hold the pen steady. That’s the image I can’t shake.

A man with too many names, trying to write himself into the story before the world writes him out.

He didn’t win. He didn’t survive. But his fiction did.

And sometimes, that’s the more lasting kind of immortality.