From Brooklyn Jew to Austrian Blueblood
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree
The Sunday New York Times is generally full of fascinating stories about this and that. This week’s paper featured the unusually choice tale of one Alan Z. Feuer, who, by dint of will and subterfuge, managed to transform himself from a Brooklyn-born Jewish kid into a socialite and an “Austrian blueblood,” whose métier was the fancy dress ball.
Feuer was hardly the first, and probably not the last, Jewish male to envision himself as someone else. Take, for instance, Trebitsch Lincoln, a character so chameleon-like it’s hard to believe that he did not actually spring from the pages of a potboiler.
Born Ignacz Trebitsch in Hungary, he subsequently converted from Judaism to Christianity, becoming, in short order, a missionary in Canada, a British Member of Parliament, a German spy whose double-dealings were duly noted by the FBI and the abbot of a Buddhist monastery in China. The subject of a wonderful book by Bernard Wasserstein, “The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln,” this man was as dazzling, and shape-shifting, as they come.
So, too, was Kurban Said, aka Essad Bey, né Lev Nussinbaum. Profiled by Tom Reiss in his scintillating read, “The Orientalist,” this Baku-born Jew, the son of a Russian Jewish woman, exchanged his Western garb and Jewish cultural identity for the flowing robes and turbans of an Arab. Cutting quite the figure in Weimar Germany and interwar Vienna, whose cafes he frequented, Nussinbaum would go on to publish the highly esteemed and widely read 1937 romance novel, “Ali and Nino,” the story of a knotty love affair between an Azerbaijani Muslim and a Georgian princess.
Feuer had his top hat and tails, Trebitsch his prayer beads and Nussinbaum his turban. And yet, despite their radically dissimilar trajectories, each of these three Jewish men threw over their natal identities in favor of one that was entirely made-up, fashioned from whole cloth.
We’re left to wonder what, if anything, this says about the plasticity of identity in the modern era.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
