not have seen it for ten or twenty years. The case for Lev Nussimbaum's authorship The claim that Lev Nussimbaum was the novel's author began circulating in 1944, when an Italian translation of the novel appeared, listing the author as "Mohammed Essad Bey." Tom Reiss notes this as "a first posthumous restoration" of Nussimbaum's authorship. (This Italian edition was brought to press by Dr. Ahmed Giamil Vacca-Mazzara (né Bello Vacca), who claimed himself to be Kurban Said and denied that Essad Bey was a Jew named Lev Nussimbaum.). When the novel was translated into English by Jenia Graman and published by Random House in 1970, John Wain, the author of the introduction, described the figure behind the name Kurban Said, without naming him, as having the biographical attributes of Nussimbaum. Assertions that Nussimbaum was the author were occasionally repeated thereafter. Azerbaijani translator Charkaz Qurbanov, identified in the list of interviewees at the end of the film, Alias Kurban Said as "Cherkes Burbanly" identifies himself (as transcribed and transliterated in the English subtitles) as "Cherkes Qurbanov has argued, in a discussion shown in the film Alias Kurban Said, that "Kurban Said is the literary pseudonym of Mohammed Essad Bey. Statistics have shown, and so has my research, that the novels written by Essad Bey and Kurban Said are in exactly the same style. There is no difference. In Essad Bey's work you see Azerbeidshan [i.e., Azerbaijan] underneath." Another participant, identified in the list of interviewees at the end of the film Alias Kurban Said as "Zeydulla Achaev." It may be that this person is the man more commonly known as Zeydulla Ağayevdən, who has translated Ali and Nino into Azeri. The discussion said "The text is German, but it is an Azerbeidshan [i.e., Azerbaijani] type of German. Essad Bey's German is what a real German would never use. The sentence structure shows that he is not German." Documentary evidence for Lev Nussimbaum's authorship There are three documents written by people who knew Nussimbaum attesting that he was the author of the book. One is a letter published in the New York Times in August 1971 from Bertha Pauli, an Austrian literary agent who knew Nussimbaum in Vienna from 1933 to 1938 and had helped him get publishing opportunities through a writers' cooperative called Austrian Correspondence (which Pauli said she "had organized to provide authors whose work was ‘undesirable’ in the Third