Blood and Oil in the Orient

Description

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 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 Nussimbaum’s 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.