Essad Bey

Lev Nussimbaum (Mohammad Essad Bey)
Born	October 17, 1905 Kiev, Russian Empire
Died	August 27, 1942 Positano, near Naples, Italy

Lev Nussimbaum (Kiev, October 17, 1905 – Positano, 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, who spent his childhood in Baku before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14. 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 for himself a niche in the competitive European literary world by writing about topics that Westerners, in general, knew little about - the Caucasus, Russian Empire, 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 his name and rarely quote him, though the topics Essad Bey chose to write about are still critically relevant. Furthermore, 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 name, which by then had become famous. 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 appeared in German - only two novellas in Polish.

Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905, according to himself in a train, though documents in the Kiev State Archives and the Kiev Synagogue state that Lev Nussimbaum was born in Kiev. Nussimbaum's birth was originally registered in the Kyiv Synagogue.

His father, Abraam Leybusovich Nussimbaum, was a Jew from Tiflis, in the present-day Georgia, born in 1875, who 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. 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 then hired Alice Schulte, a woman of German ethnicity to be his son's governess.

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