Mavi Boncuk |
THE GIRL FROM THE GOLDEN HORN By Kurban Said.
Overlook, $25.95.
tr. from German by Jenia Graman. 280p. Overlook. 2001. Tr $25.95. ISBN 1-58567-173-8.

The story of the author of this 1938 novel, written in German and now appearing in English for the first time, is nearly as exotic as the book itself. Kurban Said is a pseudonym taken by the Jewish writer Lev Nussimbaum to protect himself from the Nazis. Nussimbaum, who is believed to have been born in what is now Azerbaijan in 1905, eventually settled in Berlin and Vienna and died in Italy in 1942. Before he became Kurban Said, though, he was Essad Bey, a Turkish name he adopted after he fell under the spell of the East and took to wearing turbans and passing himself off as the son of a Muslim lord. The author of at least 14 books, he wrote only one other novel, ''Ali and Nino,'' which has something of a cult following. (If these aren't twists enough, the family of an Austrian baroness alleges that she was actually the author of ''Ali and Nino.'') In any case, the plots of both novels concern the same conflict between East and West that obsessed Nussimbaum personally. In ''The Girl From the Golden Horn,'' a Muslim girl, Asiadeh, the daughter of a Turkish pasha who has fled to Berlin in the 1920's after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, falls in love with and marries a Viennese doctor. But she soon crosses paths with a Hollywood screenwriter, John Rolland, who, improbably, turns out to be the Turkish prince to whom she was long ago betrothed. Asiadeh must choose between the two men. It would spoil the suspense to reveal which man Asiadeh chooses, and suspense is perhaps the only reason to read this novel. In addition to its contrived plot, the book is burdened with philosophical discussions of the split between East and West, which, though they have new resonance today, feel didactic and polemical.

The story behind the books written by Kurban Said is almost as fascinating as the tales he wove. Said's first book was ALI AND NINO, first published in the original German before the outbreak of World War II. It was discovered in a Vienna used book store several years ago and published in the United States in 1999. Said is thought to be Lev Naussimbaum (alias Essad Bey), son of a German governess and a Jewish businessman. He changed his religion and his name in the early Nazi years, and it is believed that the books were published through the help of the Austrian Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels. THE GIRL FROM THE GOLDEN HORN was originally published under her name, but is now acknowledged to be the work of Said, whose relationship with the Baroness has never been entirely clear.