Blood and Oil in the Orient is the story of Lev Nussimbaum, a young Azerbaijani nobleman, and his mad flight across Asia to escape the Bolshevik terror sparked by the Russian Revolution. Full of picturesque descriptions of the different people he met and the stories he heard, Blood and Oil in the Orient is a kaleidoscope view of the old east, as it is brought to a close by the waves of violence and revolution that come crashing down around it. Within its pages are accounts of the the crooks, kings, mad-poets, and oil-barons that Nussimbaum must have met firsthand during his childhood in the gilded mansions of Baku.

Blood and Oil tells the story of his childhood in Baku and of he and his father’s flight through Asia to escape the Soviet encroachment, travelling West through Persia and the Ottoman Empire before finally settling in Germany. Along the way he meets a broad cast of characters, and describes the tapistry of ethnic groups which make up the Caucuses. From the Jassaians, a people who do not work as a matter of tradition; to the Khevsureti, a long lost army of German crusaders who intermarried with local Caucasian women, to the wild mountain Jews who are so ancient that any trace of where they came from has long been lost to time. Lev Nussimbaum saw the last dying gasps of the old world order, and died young and impoverished in Italy shortly before the end of the World War II. With no close friends or relatives, he left nothing but the written memories of a homeland that no longer existed.

A man without a home

Born in Baku in on October 17, 1905 to a prominent Jewish family of oil barons, Nussimbaum was forced to flee Azerbaijan at the age of 14 to escape the Russian invasion of his country. Fleeing, often on foot, through the polyethnic Caucuses with his father and whatever the two of them could carry, Nussimbaum would eventually find his way to Europe where he settled in Berlin and had a distinguished career as an orientalist in Weimar Germany.

He was an incredibly prolific author, publishing almost 19 books and countless essays during his short career, including Alice and Nino, which is widely considered to be the defining novel of Azerbaijan. In fact, he was such a prolific author that his publishers warned him to keep his output down to two books a year in order to not seem overly prolific. Rather than cut back on his work, he published under no less than three pen names.

Aside from a prodigious literary output, he found the time to become deeply involved in the politics of his time. He converted to Islam, either in Turkey or Berlin, and helped to found an Islamic student group called Islamia, which quickly disowned him with accusations of not being a “real Muslim.” A profile by the New York Herold wrote that he “carries no prayer rug; he fails to salute Mecca when he prays… eats pigs and drinks wine; yet when he came to be married in Berlin he refused to abjure his creed.” Despite this he never renounced his Islamic faith, and published a number of books and essays about Islam and the Prophet Mohamed. He had several high profile affairs with wealthy German and American women. Briefly moved to the United States. Was involved in the German-Russian League Against Bolshevism, the Social Monarchist Party, and the Young Russian Movement. His anti Bolshevik credentials were so strong that the Nazi propaganda minister even included several of his books in their list of “excellent books for German minds”, which is no small achievement for a Jewish refugee-turned Muslim revert. Sadly his Jewish background did eventually make him a target of suspicion by the Nazis, and he was forced to flee to Italy.