It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.

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. Ali and Nino is Kurban Saids masterpiece. The outbreak of the Second World War could easily have meant that Ali and Nino was never discovered by an English-speaking audience. Precisely these two facets of Orientalism in Kurban Saids novel deserve a deeper analysis. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942. Also, he could have praised Ali and Nino as a predecessor of his own enterprise to critique European cultural hegemony and its basis in Orientalism. A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria. It was a major success, translated into several other languages, but was forgotten by the end of World War II. Born in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. Ali and Nino is a novel published in German in 1937 under the alias 'Kurban Said,' a love story between a Muslim man and a Christian woman set in Baku, Azerbaijan, during World War I and the country's brief independence. 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'. Kurban Said, Ali and Nino 2 likes Like If a guest enters your house holding the severed head of your only son in his hand, you must still receive him, offer him food and drink and honour him as a guest.’ That is a wise law. 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.

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