The Disorientalists: Who Was Essad Bey?
In their songs, The Disorientalists tell the life story of the German writer Essad Bey. The name is hardly known nowadays, but it was really big in 1930s Berlin. Lev Nussimbaum was born to a Jewish family in Kiev in 1905. 17 years later, he converted to Islam, adopted the name Essad Bey and wrote a number of bestsellers in the pre-war period. His mother was a friend of Stalin and his father an oil industrialist in Azerbaidzhan. Essad Bey staged himself as a Persian prince, disclaimed his Jewish origin and intended to write the first official Mussolini biography. This strange but true story is told in the songs of Yuriy Gurzhy (RotFront), Daniel Kahn (Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird) and Marina Frenk (Kapelsky & Marina) aka The Disorientalists.
Cabaret, klezmer, oriental swing, ragtime and reggae all belong to their stage performance that premiered two years ago in Studio Я of the Gorki Theater.
Production supported by the Freundeskreis des Maxim Gorki Theaters.
Please inform yourself about our current admission and hygiene rules before the event.
Picture: The Disorientalists (c) Alexandra Terziyska
14. October 2021
at 20:00 hrs
Price: 15 €/10 €
