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.

The outbreak of the Second World War could easily have meant that Ali and Nino was never discovered by an English-speaking audience. Kurban Said is an alias for the publicist Elfriede von Ehrenfels, born in 1894, and presumably for the coffee-house-litterateur Lev Nussimbaum (19051942). First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure has been compared to Dr. Graman, (Anchor Books, 2000), 282 pages (ISBN. Having then gone on to Italy, he ended up under house arrest in Positano, where he died of a rare blood disease in 1942. The latest English edition of the book: Said, Kurban, Ali and Nino: A Love Story, transl.

A flamboyant in the literary world of 1920s Berlin, he fled from Nazi Germany to Austria. Born in Baku in 1905, Nussimbaum had a passion for the Orient, and in his youth, converted to Islam. Ali and Nino by Kurban Said is a tragic love story set in Russian-ruled Caucasia and Persia at the time of World War I. 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'. The real identity of Kurban Said, the author of this 63-year-old novel, was a mystery until 1991, when a splendid piece of investigative journalism published in. 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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