{"product_id":"the-orientalist-isbn-9780812972764","title":"The Orientalist","description":"A thrilling page-turner of epic proportions, Tom Reiss’s panoramic bestseller tells the true story of a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. Lev Nussimbaum escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan and, as “Essad Bey,” became a celebrated author with the enduring novel Ali and Nino as well as an adventurer, a real-life Indiana Jones with a fatal secret. Reiss pursued Lev’s story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal–and sometimes as heartbreaking–as his subject’s life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Spellbinding history . . . part detective yarn, part author biography, part travel saga . . . The Orientalist is completely fascinating.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Dallas Morning News\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rarely in the literary annals of identity confusion has there been a tale as gripping. . . .  A captivating and disquieting parable of the mystery of identity . . . truly page-turning.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Miami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sympathetic, elegant, and extraordinarily affecting . . . Reiss’s storytelling panache [is] spellbinding.”\u003cbr\u003e–Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Thrilling, novelistic and rich with the personal and political madness of early-twentieth-century Europe.” \u003cbr\u003e–Entertainment Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A brainy, nimble, remarkable book.”\u003cbr\u003e–Chicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A wondrous tale, beautifully told . . . mesmerizing, poignant, and almost incredible. Reiss, caught up in the spell of Essad Bey, has turned around and worked some magic of his own.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For sheer reading pleasure . . . this book cannot be bettered.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Sun\u003cb\u003eTom Reiss\u003c\/b\u003e has written about politics and culture for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere.  He lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.Introduction\u003cbr\u003eOn the Trail of Kurban Said\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn a cold November morning in Vienna, I walked a maze of narrow streets on the way to see a man who promised to solve the mystery of Kurban Said. I was with Peter Mayer, the president of the Overlook Press, a large, rumpled figure in a black corduroy suit who wanted to publish Said’s small romantic novel \u003ci\u003eAli andNino.\u003c\/i\u003eMayer tended to burst into enthusiastic monologues about thebook: “You know how when you look at a Vermeer, and it’s an interior,and it’s quite quiet, yet somehow, what he does with perspective, with light, it feels much bigger–that’s this novel!” A love story set in the Caucasus on the eve of the Russian Revolution, \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003ehad been originally published in German in 1937 and was revived in translation in the seventies as a minor classic. But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags, or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire, or a Viennese café-society writer who died in Italy after stabbing himself in the foot. In the jacket photograph of a book called \u003ci\u003eTwelve Secrets of the Caucasus, \u003c\/i\u003ethe mysterious author is dressed up as a mountain warrior–wearing a fur cap, a long, flowing coat with a sewn-in bandolier, and a straight dagger at his waist. Mayer and I were on our way to a meeting with a lawyer named Heinz Barazon, who was challenging Overlook over proper author credit on the  novel. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarazon claimed to know the true identity of Kurban Said, and as  the lawyer for the author’s heirs, he was insisting that it be acknowledged  in the new edition of \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003eor he would block publication. At the  lawyer’s address, next to a shop where some old women were bent over tables  with needle and thread, we were buzzed into a lobby that could have  had the grime of the Anschluss on its fixtures. Mayer squeezed my arm  with excitement and said, “It’s \u003ci\u003eThe Third Man\u003c\/i\u003e!” Barazon’s appearance  didn’t do anything to dispel the atmosphere of a Cold War thriller. He was  a small man with a gravelly voice, a stooped back, and a clubfoot that  made a tremendous racket as he led us down his book-lined hallway. “You  have both come a long way to discover the identity of Kurban Said,” he  said. “It will all soon become clear to you.” He ushered us into a room  where a gaunt and beautiful blond woman with enormous glassy eyes was  lying motionless on a couch. “Pardon me, this is Leela,” said Barazon.  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” Leela said in a fragile, precise voice. “I must  remain lying down because I’m ill. I can’t sit for long.”  Barazon came directly to the point: the novel \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003ewas written  by the Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof, the second wife of  Leela’s father, Baron Omar-Rolf von Ehrenfels, and when Baroness Elfriede  died, in the early 1980s, having outlived her husband, all rights to  the work had passed down to Leela. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarazon produced a thick file of documents that backed up this story:  publishing contracts, legal papers, and author lists from the late thirties,  stamped with Nazi eagles and swastikas. Under the entry for “Said, Kurban”  in the author’s section of the 1935—39 \u003ci\u003eDeutscher Gesamtkatalog\u003c\/i\u003e–the  Third Reich’s equivalent of \u003ci\u003eBooks in Print\u003c\/i\u003e–it said, in no uncertain terms,  “pseudonym for Ehrenfels, v. Bodmershof, Elfriede, Baroness.”  The Nazi documents seemed to tell a clear story–that Baroness Elfriede  had been Kurban Said–but it was one that I believed to be untrue.  I had become interested in the identity of Kurban Said in the spring  of 1998, when I went to Baku to write about the city’s new oil boom–  virtually the first signs of life since the Russian Revolution made time stop  there in 1917. Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan, a tiny country that prides  itself on being the easternmost point in Europe, though most Europeans  wouldn’t know it. Its proximity to Iran and the fact that the majority of its  citizens are Shiite Muslims can dominate your vision of Azerbaijan until  you realize that the most impressive public building in Baku is not a  mosque but a copy of the grand casino at Monte Carlo. Baku is the sort of  city that has been beyond rigid ideologies and religions for a thousand  years. Its name is said to derive from a Persian expression, \u003ci\u003ebaadiyekubiden,  \u003c\/i\u003eor “blow of the winds.” Being situated at the head of a desert  peninsula jutting into the sea, the city is in fact one of the windiest places  on earth–one dapper ninety-seven-year-old man told me how, as a young  man, he and his family had worn specially made goggles with their  evening clothes to stroll along the boulevards without being blinded by  the sands. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust before I left for Baku, an Iranian friend had recommended Kurban  Said’s novel \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003eas a kind of introduction to the city and the Caucasus  in general, saying that it would be more useful than any tourist  guide. I had never heard of it, and when I tracked down a 1972 Pocket  Books edition, I was a little surprised by the cover. It featured two airbrushed  lovers and an endorsement from \u003ci\u003eLife: \u003c\/i\u003e“If Kurban Said can’t push  Erich Segal off the bestseller list, nobody can!” But there turned out to be  something of the eighteenth century about the book, as if \u003ci\u003eCandide \u003c\/i\u003ehad  been written with realistic characters and the intention of sweeping readers  off their feet. Each scene continued only long enough to spring some  miniature gear that moved the mechanism forward. The reviewer in \u003ci\u003eThe  New York Times \u003c\/i\u003ehad written, “One feels as if one has dug up buried  treasure.”The novel revolves around the love between a Muslim boy and a Christian  girl and the progress of their relationship as they grow up; in the culturally  tolerant world of old Azerbaijan, their courtship seems blessed,  though they are constantly bickering: “ ‘Ali Khan, you are stupid. Thank  God we are in Europe. If we were in Asia they would have made me wear  the veil ages ago, and you couldn’t see me.’ I gave in. Baku’s undecided  geographical situation allowed me to go on looking into the most beautiful  eyes in the world.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the course of its history, Azerbaijan had been conquered by  Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Ottomans, and the Persians. Finally,  its “undecided geographical situation” was resolved when the Russians  captured it in 1825. During the period of czarist expansion in the  Caucasus, so vividly recounted by Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Europe  discovered Baku and Baku discovered Europe. And everyone discovered oil. Lots of it.   In Baku you did not need to drill for the stuff–it sat on the surface of the earth, in black ponds,sometimes enormous lakes–and the flow could be so strong that crude occasionally swallowed wholehouses along the Caspian shore. The walled caravan outpost soon became  the center of the burgeoning global oil industry–supplying more than  half the world’s crude–and the result was a fabulous nineteenth-century  city built on the profits: extravagant mansions, mosques, casinos, and theaters  from the period when the city was home to the Rothschilds, the Nobels,  and dozens of local Muslim “oil barons,” as they were called. There  was Mir Babayev, a popular singer who, after discovering oil on his land,  spent the rest of his days searching out his record albums and destroying  them because he preferred to be remembered as an oil magnate. And there  was Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, who made his fortune when an earthquake  struck his land, flooding it with oil; he built the first school for girls  in the Muslim world. Building wars sprang up. Moorish palaces still sit  next to Gothic manses, and Byzantine cupolas next to bejeweled rococo  pavilions. The locals styled themselves cultured Europeans and “modern  Muslims,” right up to the point when the Bolsheviks decided they were  decadent bourgeois and swooped in to crush them. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut Baku oil fueled Stalin’s Five Year Plans, and during the Second  World War, Hitler wanted Baku’s oil so badly that he redirected the entire  Russian campaign to get it. In September 1942, his general staff presented  him with a giant cake in the shape of the Caucasus. A newsreel of the occasion  shows the führer cutting himself the piece with baku spelled out in  frosting. “Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost,” Hitler shouted at a  top commander, and he sacrificed the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad  rather than redirect a single division out of the Caucasus to come  to its aid. If they had succeeded in grabbing Baku, the combined Nazi  armies would have controlled one of the greatest strategic energy reserves  in the world–not to mention one of the most strategic pieces of territory,  the land bridge between Europe and Asia–and, with the Soviet Union  deprived of its oil, the Nazis would have for all purposes won the war. Instead  of victory, the push for Baku brought utter defeat on the Russian  front, and less than three years later, Soviet armored divisions, tanked up  with Baku oil, were at the gates of Berlin. After 1945, rather than being rewarded for having fueled the Russian victory, Azerbaijan saw many of its citizens deported to Siberia and its oil industry allowed to languish. The fin de siècle oil-boom city was deliberately  ignored, forgotten, taking on a deserted, vaguely eerie quality, so that  even today it is possible to imagine that one has wandered into some unusually  sooty Right Bank neighborhood in Paris, mysteriously abandoned  by its inhabitants. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy guide to Baku was Fuad Akhundov, a muscular young fellow who  worked as an agent of Interpol, the international police agency, but  seemed to spend most of his time sleuthing his city’s hidden past. Growing  up in the Soviet era, Fuad had always wondered about the lost culture  that had built the decaying mansions all around him, so he began investigating  the city’s history, mansion to mansion, house to house. Fuad  seemed to know the decaying mansions of Baku like members of his own  family. “I entered these edifices, asking if anyone knew the descendants of  the owner,” he told me as we drove around the city in his battered Russian  car. “As a policeman, I knew that often people who think they know  nothing can provide vital information, so I used the crafts of interrogation,  getting people to recall things their dead grandparents or parents  mentioned to them over the course of the years.” Fuad spoke fluent English  that made him sound a bit like a nineteenth-century novel. When he  needed to go somewhere, he would say things like “Now your humble servant  must beg to take his leave, as he must attend to some pressing police  matters.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs we explored Baku’s medieval ramparts, nineteenth-century mansions,  Zoroastrian temples, and palace gardens straight out of \u003ci\u003eThe Arabian  Nights, \u003c\/i\u003eFuad rarely stopped talking. “From here I could see my world, the  massive wall of the town’s fortress and the ruins of the palace, Arab inscriptions  at the gate,” he rhapsodized. “Through the labyrinth of streets  camels were walking, their ankles so delicate that I wanted to caress them.  In front of me rose the squat Maiden’s Tower, surrounded by legends and  tourist guides. And behind the tower the sea began, the utterly faceless,  leaden, unfathomable Caspian Sea, and beyond, the desert–jagged rocks  and scrub: still, mute, unconquerable, the most beautiful landscape in the  world.” It took me a while to realize that he was quoting, and that the passage  was from \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino. \u003c\/i\u003eThe mere smell of the air in a certain part of town would cause Fuad to launch into a quotation from the novel, and often we would stop in front of some Viennese imperial-style edifice–with holes where stone portraits  of famous Communists had once been added to the design–and he  would say, as though describing an event from history: “That is the girls’  school where Ali first saw Nino with his cousin Ayeshe. We can be sure because  of this doorway, which is approximately four hundred paces from  the original door of the old Baku Russian Boys Gymnasium, which was  destroyed during the fighting in 1918 . . .” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt could have been like one of those morbid literary tours of places  mentioned in Chekhov or Pushkin, but Fuad’s love of \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino  \u003c\/i\u003eseemed of an entirely different order. “This novel made me discover my  country, it made me discover the whole world that lay beneath my feet,  buried by the Soviet system,” he told me one night as we sat in the empty  Interpol headquarters at three in the morning. “Only this one book–this  Romeo and Juliet story at the height of the oil boom, between a Christian  girl and a Muslim boy, it tears away the fabric which has covered me growing  up here in Soviet Baku like a shroud, like a funeral veil dropped by the  bloodiest version of the West, the inhuman Bolshevik Revolution, upon  this fantastic world of the highest cultural and human aspirations–  the hope of the total merger of East and West into something new and  modern–which existed for but a moment in time. Can you imagine it?”  Fuad said. “Kurban Said is like my lifeline. Without him, I would be  trapped here in my own city and not really be able to feel or understand  the beauty and yet tragic forces that are beneath my very nose.”  Fuad’s obsession with \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003ewas shared by many people in Baku. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEducated Azeris I met seemed to consider it their national novel, telling  me that they could show me the street, square, or schoolhouse where almost  every scene had taken place. There was a resurgence of interest in the  late 1990s in this small romantic novel from the late 1930s, though nobody  seemed exactly sure why. I paid a call on an Iranian film producer who occupied  a lavishly refurbished suite in a collapsing old mansion, and who  explained to me his plans to make a movie of the book. (When the money  didn’t come through, he instead produced the Baku location scenes for a  James Bond movie.) Another day I visited the National Literary Society, a  Stalin-era building, where the chairman filled me in on the simmering dispute  in Azeri academic and government circles over the novel’s authorship.  Kurban Said’s identity had long been a subject of speculation, he  explained, but fortunately, the issue had now been resolved: Kurban Said  was the pseudonym for Josef Vezir, an Azeri author whose sons, the  Veziroffs, had been very active in making sure his memory was preserved,  and that he receive credit for Azerbaijan’s national novel. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut when I got a copy of some short stories and novellas by Vezir, I was  surprised that anyone could give this theory credence. Vezir was clearly an  ardent Azeri nationalist whose novellas openly stated that ethnic and cultural  mixing was a bad idea and a betrayal of the motherland. In \u003ci\u003eAli and  Nino, \u003c\/i\u003eKurban Said offers nothing less than a passionate endorsement of  ethnic, cultural, and religious mixing. The warmest passages in the novel  describe the cosmopolitan Caucasus on the eve of the revolution–when  a hundred races and all the major religious groups fought together only in  battles of poetry in the marketplace–and the message seems to be that  the separation of peoples is hideous and genocidal. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA few nights later, while I was supposed to be in a disco hanging out  with young oil boomers from London and Moscow, I convinced Fuad to  let me use the Interpol offices to interview one of the Veziroff brothers.  The brother had gone so far as to appear before the Azeri Parliament to  insist that his father had written \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino \u003c\/i\u003eand that the scenes about  interethnic love had been slipped in by a malicious translator. I had the  vague hope that the atmosphere of the interrogation room might help get  at the truth; however, my meeting with the bald, serious fellow in a sagging  gray Soviet-style suit produced only an endless stream of documentation  that proved nothing but that most everyone in Baku wanted to claim  the novel for his or her own reasons. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe introduction to the English copy of the novel I had wasn’t much  help, either: “ ‘Kurban Said’ is a pen-name and no one seems to know for  certain the real name of the man who chose it. . . . He was by nationality  a Tartar [who died] . . . where, and under what circumstances, I do not  know and I do not think anyone knows.”Wherever I went, Kurban Said seemed to pursue me.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe single book for sale in English in the gift shop of Baku’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, where  I was staying, was a smudgy-looking paperback called \u003ci\u003eBlood and Oil in the  Orient. \u003c\/i\u003eOn its cover, printed just above a sepia photo of a Caspian gusher  and a bunch of oilmen in fur hats, the text stated that it was by “the author  of \u003ci\u003eAli \u0026amp; Nino,\u003c\/i\u003e” whose name was given as “Essad-Bey” and beneath  that, in parentheses, as “Lev Naussimbaum.” What happened to Kurban  Said? A foreword by an Azeri scholar attempted to clarify matters:  Essad-Bey, the narrator of the tales in this book, eventually converted to  Judaism and chose the name Lev Naussimbaum. . . . He then moves on  to Berlin where he joins a circle of German intellectuals. In the early  thirties, he travels to Vienna. Eventually, he publishes his beautiful  novel, “Ali and Nino,” under the pseudonym of Kurban Said. . . . In  1938 he tried to escape the German onslaught. Soon he was arrested and  moved to Italy. There, in 1942, he stabbed himself in the foot and died  of this self-inflicted wound. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI doubted that anyone would convert to Judaism just before moving to  Germany in the late 1920s. But why would this Essad Bey change his  name to “Lev Naussimbaum” and then Kurban Said? Could the national  novel of Azerbaijan have been written by someone named Naussimbaum?  And what did either of these people have to do with Kurban Said? \u003ci\u003eBlood  and Oil in the Orient \u003c\/i\u003ecarried the subtitle “Petroleum Industry and Trade in  Azerbaijan”–it was hard to imagine that this was the same author who  had written \u003ci\u003eAli and Nino. \u003c\/i\u003eBut then I noticed odd similarities between the novel and the oil  book–of village duels between fighting poets, in which beggars and aristocrats,  Christians and Muslims, would meet on an appointed day and recite  insulting doggerel at each other, all the while sweating and cursing,  until one was declared the victor. (In the novel, the winner spits when  asked how it feels to have prevailed: “There is no victory, sir. In former  times there were victories. In those days art was held in high esteem.”)  Though the narrative style of the novel was more assured, the almost Ozlike  quality of prerevolutionary Azerbaijan was vivid in both. Their  poignancy was amplified by the fact that the villages of the fighting poets  were in Nagorno Karabakh–a place virtually destroyed in the 1990s by a  vicious Muslim-Christian border war, where the weapons were anything  but similes and metaphors. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day, when we were touring the decayed grand mansion of Teymur  Bey Ashurbekov, with its peeling stairwell frescoes of cavorting maidens,  Fuad asked me if I would like to meet the daughters of its original  owner–the two surviving members of the Ashurbekov family, Sara and  Miriam (now Ashurbeyly, since the post-Soviet Azeri government was  Turkicizing everyone’s names). Aged ninety-two and ninety-four, they  were among the only surviving children of the oil millionaires still alive in  Baku, I thought we would find them here, in some dank corner of the  mansion, but instead we got back in the little white car and drove to a depressing  late-Soviet-era building, where we climbed the back stairs and  were ushered into a tiny flat by the younger of the ancient sisters, Miriam.  Her sister, Sara, sat waiting for us next to a pot of tea and a very dustylooking  box of chocolates. The sisters’ extensive library was crushed into a  tiny living space along with their laundry, pantry, dining table, and twelve  cats. Despite the opposition of the state, they had carved out distinguished  careers for themselves: Miriam was a geologist, and Sara was Azerbaijan’s  leading medieval historian. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSpeaking to me in the German and French they had learned as children,  the sisters recalled their lives before the revolution. They told me  how their father had invited people of all nationalities and stations of life  to their mansion, preferring to acknowledge an elite based on intelligence  and education rather than social status, even though he had been born  into privilege and come upon great wealth (the family had financed two of  Baku’s four mosques). They showed me stacks of dusty photographs–men in fezzes and  evening dress on the way to the opera, camels walking alongside Rolls-  Royces–and they described the wide circle of friends their parents entertained  at home, when Christians, Muslims, and Jews, all the children of  the capitalist set, mixed at banquets, games, and lavish parties. Most of all,  Ashurbekov had valued European culture. His daughters remembered  their Baku as a place where Islam and the Orient were filtered through a  multicultural European lens polished by frequent trips to the West. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“My father often had to work,” said Sara, “but he always said to my  mother: ‘Take the children to Europe!’ ” She showed me a photo of herself  surrounded by little blond children in Germanic costume. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is me in Baden-Baden in 1913. I had just won the beauty contest,”  said Sara. “My sister, Miriam, started crying, and she said to our mother, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘But you always said I was the most beautiful one, how come Sara won?’ \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Because you are too small,’ replied our mother. ‘When we come back  next year, you will win.’ But next year was the First World War, and then  the Bolsheviks came, and none of us ever went back to Europe again.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Ashurbekovs brought out a final picture, a group photo of their  last Christmas party, on the eve of the Great War. Sara’s bony finger  pointed to the faces as the sisters recalled the names, nationalities, and  religions of every child in the room, children of the oil barons, drillers,  and servants alike–Azeri, Armenian, Muslim, Jewish, German, French,  Russian–and what happened to each of them after the invasion of the  Red Army in 1920: the pretty pink-cheeked girl in a gypsy headdress in the  second row, the gangly boy with Indian features dressed like a Cossack in  the back next to the tree, a little blond boy in a tightly buttoned suit who  was probably one of the Nobel brood, though they couldn’t quite see his  face. Then, seated in the middle, in the third row, was a little boy with big  ears and a rather arrogant but bold and open expression, staring directly  into the camera, his arms crossed defiantly, a velvet jacket buttoned over a  floppy Lord Fauntleroy collar. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That was little Liova Nussimbaum,” Sara said. Her sister nodded and  smiled, remembering. “He was a Jewish boy about two years our junior.”  Really? I asked, remembering the name on the jacket of \u003ci\u003eBlood and Oil.  \u003c\/i\u003eAre you sure the name was Liova–the Russian diminutive for Lev–  Nussimbaum? Exactly that name? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Yes, Liova, Liova, little Liova Nussimbaum. He was the smartest of all  the children, a very smart little Jewish boy whose father was a rich businessman  in town. He never had a mother, and the family tried to compensate  for this. He was a very nice and a very well-mannered boy, and since  his earliest childhood, he was fluent in German. His governess was a German  lady, I believe.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Probably a Baltic German,” Fuad put in. “It was very common to have  a Baltic German governess here then–also French.” I noticed a pair of  stout fräuleins flanking the children, slightly rough-looking women incongruously  dressed in sequined evening gowns for the occasion. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“He left Baku,” said the ancient lady, “and we heard he later died in  Italy.”National bestseller;  [quote] --The Dallas Morning News A Notable Book of the Year; The New York Times Book Review","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305339539685,"sku":"NP9780812972764","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812972764.jpg?v=1767740816","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-orientalist-isbn-9780812972764","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}