Essad Bey was born in October, 1905 as Lev Nussimbaum, probably in Kiev. He grew up in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. His father Abraham, a Ashkenasic jew born in Tbilisi/Georgia was an oil well owner, his mother a Jewish-Russian revolutionary and acquaintance of Stalin. She committed suicide in 1911. Lev was about 5 years old.

   From his nanny, Frau Alice Schulte, he learned Germany early on – the language in which he would become a famous author many years later. Their flight 1917 from the Revolution led Nussimbaum (aged 12 at the time) father and son through Constantinople, Rome and Paris to Berlin, where they arrived in 1921 and were to settle. Here Lev attended the Russian Gymnasium and took evening courses in Turkish and Arabic at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. In 1922 he converted to Islam and began calling himself Essad Bey.

   Beginning in 1926, Essad Bey wrote a number of articles for "Die literarische Welt" and several other German magazines. In 1932 he married Erika Loewendahl, the daughter of shoe wholesaler Walter Loewendahl. The couple lived for a short time in Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. In 1937 the marriage fell apart as Erika left her husband for the author René Fülöp-Möller. The separation created a scandal in the international press and had a devastating effect on Essad Bey’s psyche.

   Between 1931 and 1937, Essad Bey wrote at least sixteen books, all of which were translated into several languages. Among them were a biography of Stalin (1931), Czar Nicholas (1935), Resa Shah (1936), and Lenin (1937, published only in Italian). His biography of Mohammed (1932) is still available today and captivates us through the density of its atmosphere.

   His first book, the present autobiography "Blood and Oil in the Orient" (1929), was a bestseller in Germany and the U.S. For his friend George Sylvester Viereck, he wrote a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II that was published only in English, bearing the title “The Kaiser on Trail” and under Viereck’s name.

   Another of Lev Nussimbaum’s pseudonyms was Kurban Said. He published the two novels “Ali and Nino” (1937) and “The Princess of the Golden Horn” (1938) under this name. The debate about the identity of the pseudonym “Kurban Said” has been satisfactorily settled by Essad Bey’s biographer, Tom Reiss. Until then, speculations had also ranged from the Austrian baroness Elfriede von Ehrenfels-Bodmersdorf to the Azerbaijani Yusuf Vesir Chemenzeminli.

   In 1937, Lev Nussimbaum fled Germany to Switzerland and settled in Positano, on the Italian Amalfi Coast, in 1938. Attempts to become the official biographer of Mussolini were unsuccessful. He died in 1942 at the age of 37, after a serious illness poor and alone.

   The American author Tom Reiss published Lev Nussimbaum’s highly-regarded biography, “The Orientalist,” in 2005. It became a bestseller in the U.S. and has up until now been translated into 14 languages. In February 2008 it appeared in German with Berlin’s Osburg Verlag under the title "Der Orientalist".