Copyright This edition first published in the United States in 1996 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected] Copyright © 1970 by Lucy Tal First published in German by Tal Verlag, Vienna in 1937 Translation copyright © 1970 Jenia Graman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. ISBN: 978-1-59020-978-3 Contents Copyright Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Introduction This remarkable book has a strange and cloudy history behind it. When I was first given the typescript to read, I had never heard of the author, which is hardly surprising, since ‘Kurban Said’ is a pen-name and no one seems to know for certain the real name of the man who chose it. This is his only book, and the man is as shadowy as the book is vivid. The little that can be gathered about him is as follows. He was by nationality a Tartar. When his country came under the rule of the newly-formed Soviet Union, he decided to leave. He went to Vienna, which must at that time have seemed an agreeable and civilised milieu in which an imaginative writer could hope to breathe the air of freedom. There, Ali and Nino was written—in German, naturally—and published in 1937. By that year, however, central Europe was in the fateful grip of Hitler and his Nazis. To a lover of freedom such as the author of this book must clearly have been, the atmosphere of Nazism was no more tolerable than the atmosphere of Soviet Communism would have been. He fled again, this time to Italy, which cannot at that time have been much better than what he was leaving. And there, he died; where, and under what circumstances, I do not know and I do not think anyone knows. Intensive research, no doubt, could unearth more facts about ‘Kurban Said’. But until someone writes a book about him on the lines of The Quest for Corvo, we are unlikely to know more than the scant facts I have just given. In a sense, this does not matter. We have his book, ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit’. From it, we can tell what kind of man he must have been. One thing is certain: he had genius. It was a genius strong enough to jump off the page and compel the attention of Jenia Graman, an artist who was living at that time in Berlin. She came across a copy of the half-forgotten Viennese edition of the book and at once saw that it must be translated and given its chance with the English-speaking public. To her initiative, we owe much. * * * * * Ali and Nino would be well worth reading even if it were not the brilliantly achieved novel that it is. It takes us, as Western readers, into a world in which it is very good for us to be. It allows us, for a few hours, to see life through the eyes of a Mohammedan. This, by itself, would be a reason