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How to pronounce Tom Reiss: last name rhymes with peace
Tom Reiss writes about international politics and culture for The New Yorker magazine. In the past, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His work often focuses on how individual lives are affected by history, and is known for its rich juxtapositions of cultures and time periods that bring forgotten people and places to life.
He was born in New York City and grew up in Texas and Massachusetts, where he graduated from Harvard College. A 1998 travel magazine assignment in Baku, Azerbaijan led him to discover the unsolved mystery of Kurban Said (pronounced kur-BAHN sa-EED), the subject of his first book The Orientalist.
He is also the author of The Black Count. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN Award and have been published in over 25 languages. He lives in New York City.
Tom Reiss's website
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Who was Lev Nussimbaum? What was he really like?
At his height he was a kind of jazz age/Weimar media star, a professional "Orientalist" who liked to play up his exotic childhood, and was part of the
café society that included people like Walter Benjamin and also the brilliant
Russian exiles, like the Nabokovs and the Pasternaks. It was during the whole "Cabaret" period in Berlin, but it was much much wilder and stranger than it
was even presented in that film. But what was amazing to me was that while most
Jews in the 20's and 30's tried as hard as they could to assimilate, Lev did
everything he could to make himself stand out. In the cafes of Berlin and Vienna
he was sporting flowing robes and a turban, and the same thing on his book
jackets. And he continued this wild career into the Nazi era, at times confusing
the Nazis so much that he had Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry writing to defend
him against another Nazi agency that wanted to persecute him as a Jew. He then
went to Italy where he became close to Mussolini's inner circle, cultivating a
group that pushed a liberal, non-racist form of Fascism. He was either
incredibly brave or incredibly suicidal, maybe a bit of both.
In an era when ...
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