The Orientalist by Tom Reiss

Author:Tom Reiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588364449
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

While the Muslim nationalists and right-wing press attacked Lev’s inauthentic “Orientalist” writings, some on the pro-communist left went after him for his unflattering depictions of the Soviets and the revolution. Vorwärts! (Forward!), the leading left publication, simply dismissed his Stalin and OGPU, saying that Essad Bey did not have “the necessary dialectical-materialist schooling” to understand events in Russia.

Attacks from the right and left made Lev a controversial figure in Germany, and his general response—to smile enigmatically and keep on writing more books—seemed to have the effect of keeping everyone guessing: What were his real politics? What was his racial background? What were the true motives of the “story swindler”? With his eclectic subject matter, odd clothes, sarcasm, and purposely Caucasian-accented German, Lev didn’t fall into any of the generally accepted categories of the day. The venom spat out at him became so potently inchoate that a Prague paper would accuse him of pursuing “purely Bolshevist rather than Islamic interests,” while in Warsaw he was denounced as “a Marxist werewolf.” The Polish piece was written in 1938, and coauthored by a Prussian nobleman with two exiled Muslim nationalists, who may have been conflating the concepts of “Jew” and “Marxist”—not to mention “werewolf”—which had by that point become largely synonymous in many circles.

Lev never appeared to mind the controversy very much. It seems he only once took the time to respond to the flurry of accusations, when he let go with a brief, oblique piece entitled “Lies Forbidden!” In general, he gave the impression that, having survived a revolution, homelessness, escape, and exile, he wasn’t going to let the hurly-burly of German factional feuding get to him. (“One doesn’t get very far with politeness in Berlin, because such an audacious race of men lives there that one has to have a sharp tongue in order to keep oneself afloat,” as Goethe once observed.)

The scandal certainly had a positive effect on book sales, and it made Lev (or rather, Essad) famous. For a young man who had recently been living with “a hundred kinds of hunger” and the prospect of life as a forsaken refugee, the idea of being the bête noire of a loose association of anti-Semites and Muslim nationalists probably did not seem that disturbing. The Nazis were scoring well in the elections by the early 1930s, but even this did not seem to worry Lev. He continued to write like a fiend, pouring out dozens of articles and working on many projects simultaneously. He wrote another book about the Caucasus, a biography of Lenin, a book on the history of oil exploration. He began gathering material for biographies of Ataturk, Reza Shah, and even former U.S. president Warren Harding (who interested him because of the Teapot Dome oil scandal). He remained one of the lead correspondents of Die Literarische Welt, and also took on big interviewing assignments for American magazines.

Except for von Paraquin, who had a particular sensitivity on account of the Armenian massacres, Lev’s attackers were a venal and racist bunch.

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