Tom Lutz at the LARB:
ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, including Argosy, The All-Story, Munsey’s, and Blue Book. The gossip columns reported his comings and goings as a man about town.
One story he loved to tell was about a certain Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, whose father was Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and whose mother was Princess Nourmahal Durani, daughter of the amir of Afghanistan. The scion Alexander was born in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, growing up in the Romanoffs’ Livadia Palace (the villa where Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin later met to carve up Europe after Germany’s surrender in 1945). In Abdullah’s story, the boy was sent from there to England for his education—where, for some reason, he went incognito, changing his name to an Arabic one, his mixed parentage allowing him to easily pass as an Arab. He attended Eton and then Oxford and joined the British armed services, which, given his many languages and changeable looks, employed him as a spy.
more here.
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