In the 1950s, however, Jenia Graman, a German who had settled in England during the war, found a copy on a Berlin bookstall, translated it into English, and had it published for a second time. Kurban Said (pronounced kur-BAHN sa-EED), is the pseudonym for the author of Ali and Nino, a novel originally published in 1937 in the German language by. Set in the years surrounding the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, Said's tale of an Azerbaijani Muslim boy in love with a Georgian Christian girl is both tender and disturbingly prescient. The outbreak of the Second World War could easily have meant that Ali and Nino was never discovered by an English-speaking audience. As is true of all great literature, Kurban Said's Ali and Nino has timeless appeal. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942. A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria. It would be nice to read this novel first but the most fascinating and informational was a biography of Kurban Said called The Orientalist published in 2005 by Tom Reiss which became the NYT Book Review of the Year. Was it possible that the Austrian countess who signed the original publishing contract, Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, could have written a novel that displays such extraordinary insight into the atmosphere of pre-First World War Baku and intimate knowledge of Muslim culture? Recent research seems to prove, once and for all, that her friend Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who had escaped Azerbaijan during the Russian Revolution and settled in Berlin, was the real 'Kurban Said'.īorn in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. The one is a short novel called Ali And Nino by one Kurban Said that was first published in German in 1937. For a long time the identity of the author who used the pseudonym 'Kurban Said' to write Ali and Nino, published in Vienna in 1937, has been surrounded by controversy.

Ali and nino by kurban said