Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote under the pen names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, was a writer and journalist, born in Kiev to a Jewish family. He lived there and in Baku during his childhood before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14. In 1922, while living in Germany, he obtained a certificate claiming that he had converted to Islam in the presence of the imam of the Turkish embassy in Berlin. He created a niche for himself in the competitive European literary world by writing about topics that Westerners, in general, knew little about - the Caucasus, the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, newly discovered oil, and Islam. He wrote under the name of Essad Bey in German.