This was a gift and much better than I expected. Basically the biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a rich Russian Jew who grew up in Baku before the Bolsheviks and as a perpetual refugee first from the Soviets and then from the Nazis ended up being a Muslim, a writer, and a minor celebrity. Perhaps it resonates a bit from my own family history of my grandmother’s family of Russian Jews who fled the civil war to Shanghai and lived under the Japanese occupation of WWII.
Now to the list of books to be read I will add Blood and Oil and Ali and Nino if I can find translations.
