Went to see
Alias Kurban Said, a Dutch documentary on a once-famous and most mysterious book/writer. Since you won't ever get to see it anyway, I can tell you all about it.
Kurban Said was the pseudonym of the writer of
Ali and Nino, a book published in Berlin in 1937 that, after a brief period of fame, was forgotten under the debris of war - only to be rediscovered upon the publication of an American translation in the late sixties.
Ali and Nino is a touching love story of a young Muslim, Azeri man and a Christian, Georgian girl who fall in love in Baku. The religious barriers make them a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, but the brief interlude of freedom around 1918, when an independent democratic republic was founded after the dissolution of Tsarist Russia, affords them a chance to be together. However, the Red Army arrives and Nino has to flee, while Ali dies at the front, trying in vain to stop its offensive. Something along those lines, anyway (I havent read the book; this is what you glean about it from the film.) One main theme, underlying the love story: Europe, or Asia?
Nobody knows exactly who Kurban Said was, and his lifestory is mostly a mystery. In the movie, director Jos de Putter seeks out some of the various possibilities - each new one more perplexing.
The working theory is that the writer was one Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Jewish oil baron, growing up in the era of Baku's first oil boom. Nussimbaum is then said to have escaped to Germany when the Soviets came, and lived in Berlin, where he was something of a star in the literary and nightlife scene. This (the timeline is quirky) was in the thirties, so to avoid the problems a Jew would have, Nussimbaum postured as a Muslim, Essad Bey, and did so with flair, appearing at social events in the traditional garb of a chief from the Caucasus. He married an American lady, who, in anger at his violent tempers, divorced him and back in America outed the story that he was really not the Bey he pretended to be. Word came back to Nazi Germany where it became a scandal, and the man fled to Austria, where he was hosted by an aristocratic couple fascinated by the Orient. Fleeing again ahead of the Anschluss he went to the Italian coastal town of Positano, where he spent his last days tormented by the gangrene that was eating away (quite literally) his leg. There, he apparently became a Fascist and applied to write anti-Soviet radio broadcasts for the regime. He is recounted to have died while listening to the one text of his that was actually broadcast.
(
Picture of Essad Bey and his American wife)
An intrigueing enough story as it is. But there's some catches, too. For example. The diligent Russian women in the Baku archive muttering, "nu, latno" and "vot" can trace back a Nussimbaum family with two children, but no Leo or Lev. And where one man shows us an old picture of a particular (and in the context of this film, symbolic) celebration - namely, a Christmas party that a loving Azeri father organised for his Muslim daughter, who would not hear of Muslims not celebrating Christmas after a schoolmate told her about it - featured folks from all walks of life, including a young Jewish kid named Lev Nussimbaum; but whether Lev is Kurban Said? The man doesn't know.
Furthermore, there's pirates on the sea. An Azeri wrote the book, says his son, and so does the old man who founded a foundation/archive in the man's name. Yusif Vezirov, who used the pen-name Yusif Vezirov Chemenzeminli, was a splendid young man, a writer who in 1918 went to Istanbul as the new Republic's ambassador, and stayed there when his country fell to the Reds, making his way to France. There, he had no money but heard of a man who bought your stories and, publishing them under his own name, paid you 25% of the profits in exchange. It was this man whom he sold his own story,
Ali and Nino, to, says his son. He couldnt possibly have published it under his own name, says the old man, because the Soviets might have discovered him and hunted him down. The man he sold his story to was a Jew, who was not from Baku at all but from Kiev - Leo Nussimbaum. And Nussimbaum couldn't possibly have been the author, because, the old man brandishes a manuscript, here is an article in which the author of
Ali and Nino warns about how his home country is taken over by the Jews!
This takes place in a genius scene, where we see three old men drinking tea in a pretty Azeri courtyard, passionately and indignantly fighting out their "academic discussion", with the old man asserting "statistical research" that proves that, in vocabulary and language use,
Ali and Nino is identical to the books the Azeri nationalist wrote in his own name, but with another of the old men retorting that the article the old man just cited included nothing about Jews, and he should know, he translated it! "You didn't even read the article!" "What, are you accusing me?! Let me tell you, as a man older and thus wiser than you - no, don't interrupt me, did I interrupt you?!" The whole scene is absolutely hilarious, evoking nothing so much as the scene in
Shutka, Book of Records where middle-aged men of prominence in the Roma town contest each other about who has the best collection of music tapes and thus will win the coveted annual prize (extra jury points if you get people in the room dancing to your tape, and bonus points if you make them cry). The use of non-sequitors, intimidation and drama by these elderly gentlemen outdoes anything in Politics here, and is so blatant it's positively endearing.
That's just the beginning though. OK, Nussimbaum / Bey was feted in Berlin, and his marriage a disaster, as the still outraged granddaughter of the American wife recounts. But in Austria await the daughter and sister of Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, the woman who was so interested in the Orient and gave Nussimbaum/Bey refuge. The one and only writer of
Ali and Nino, these two women claim - the daughter in a thin, nasal German, the sister in flourishful French - is Elfriede. After all, the daughter shows us, opening carefully preserved original documents: the contract for the book was written out to her; and the official state documents show that the pseudonym Kurban Said was referred to Elfriede. Could it be that he wrote it, but it was published under her name - what, with him being in a tricky position as refugee Jew in 1938 Austria and all? The director doesn't embarass his hosts with the question, but leaves it to us viewers to realise, merely showing how the frail Austrian girl carefully admits that,
possibly, Essad Bey might have contributed bits and pieces, but - and once again she clasps the archive documents - "the directory says the pseudonym was registered as Elfriede's, and that" - hesitation creeps into her voice - "assures me that she wrote it".
This is a theme in the movie actually, part of what makes it endearing. Many of the claimants have a terribly weak case - but it means so much to them. Clinging to the one document or reference that "proves" their father/grandmother/national hero was the real Kurban Said, they desperately seek confirmation from the viewer. With wonder and awe in her voice, Elfriede's daughter recounts how, after the two novels under the name Kurban Said, her mother retreated to Greece and studied both new and ancient Greece, devoting the rest of her life to Plato - "only Plato" - "and she never wrote another book!" Pulling one marginally relevant document after another from a coffer, the Azeri man who repeats that his father was the writer, not any Nussimbaum, asks us, rhetorically: "you draw the conclusion!". The angry American granddaughter of Bey's abused wife digs up a photoalbum said wife had carried around, entitled "Friends", that has a beautiful picture of him in it as well - and she asserts to us, in the same kind of wonder: "She must have kept it by accident - isn't it amazing, that this photo is here, when she can't have
meant to keep it - when it was preserved obviously by coincidence?" The director doesn't insist, merely asking: his name underneath, is that in her handwriting?" Yes, why, it is ... it's the strangest thing, isn't it?
Yes, perhaps it's that. A gentle observation of the truths - and self-deceptions? - people cling to, about those they love - because they love them so.
(
Google search for "kurban said" nussimbaum ehrenfels bey)
Then there's Positano. There, too, we meet people who, a generation later, still remember Essad Bey. They didn't know who he was, whether he came from Africa or Russia - they called him "Arafat". They knew him from the cafe, where he needed to be carried to on a chair, because of the gangrene (the local doctor needing to literally saw ever new pieces of his leg off as the illness worsened), and when he died, everyone grieved. So, too, did the policeman who befriended Bey - and it's that policeman's son we talk to now, and who speaks of him as if it were his own lost, intimate friend. He actually starts crying upon recounting his death: his father had talked of him often, as a friend of the family, he explains - and thus that's how he himself thought of him - a close friend.
The many people someone leaves behind, even generations later! The impact we make - how often do you stop to think about that?
The woman of the Positano archive, in turn, conjures up the funeral papers. The grave was paid for by a man with a Turkish name, one we hadn't heard yet. And it is this man, we find out next, who in 1944 or so came to the Austrian castle and introduced himself to the Ehrenfelses, at the door, with a confident "Kurban Said, c'est moi". He could even recount how he got the name: he had met a foreigner in Turkey, and had wished him a good feast, since it was a religious holiday that day, but the foreigner had misunderstood him and taken his wish as his name: Mr. Kurban Said.
Who was right? Who knows? Bey was certainly a story-teller himself. To the Italian policeman, he recounted how he was born on the train, from Europe to Asia (from Kiev to Baku?) - and as a young boy had been kidnapped by a Georgian gang, headed by Jozef Djugashvilli, the later Stalin. Fact or fiction? If you really want to know, apparently, you should buy Tom Reiss's
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, which was published just this month - the result of five years of research. But do we really need to know, is what the movie seems to ask? What I liked about it was that it didnt actually
try all too hard in solving the mystery - in fact, at times it almost seemed to go out of its way to preserve it, to preserve the notion that the mysterious Kurban Said could have been any number of people ... Legends, the message seemed to be, are to be treated with respect - for how they have come to mean so much to so many. And also because ...
Well, let's put it this way. In a way, the movie was almost like an ode to Europe, to the
cosmopolitan continent - to the webs, tragic and happy, weaved almost arbitrarily by history between so many people of so many cultures in so many places. The language shifts from Russian to Azeri to German and French to Italian and Turkish, as one after the other protagonist emerges to stake his or her claim to "Kurban Said" - and so it's like
this is what the director eventually decided to preserve: a myth, a legend, that people across the continent feel attracted to so much, that they need to claim it as their own. Making it, ultimately, the very symbol of what we share. That common, passionate affinity, the subtext seems to be, is a tribute to the power of literature as well as to the simple kindness of men - and to "Europe", itself. The Europe all those people are part of, an organic whole. And if he had solved the puzzle, he would have cut the ties of the web.
