Yosef (Felix) Avshalom      

Tartars, Who Own Oil Land, Roll in Jeweled Motor Cars.
H. G. Dwigth, in the Century Magazine.
Washington Post, 1916

I'm afraid that I shall have to tell my great-grandchildren that the Caspian is very little to look at, at least from Baku. It has no color and it smells outrageously of kerosene.
Baku, however is something to look at. (Baku is the Russian trans-Caucasian sea-port on the Caspian sea.) It is a kind of Pittsburgh dipped in Asia and it tickled me beyond measure. Not so long ago it was a wretched fishing village, inhabited chiefly by Persians and Tartars who were too stupid to sell their land to prowling oil prospectors. So those same Persians and Tartars now roll in gold. And they don't know what on earth to do with it. The consequence is that no body but a millionaire can afford to live in Baku.

But what a fantastic hodgepodge of civilization and barbarism! What types! What costumes! What morals!
Above all, what motor cars, satin lined, emblazoned, jilded, jeweled, skithering there on the edge of Asia!
It's too good to be true, but I shan't tell you about it. What I want to tell you about is a park the Russians have made there on the shore on their Caspian. They always do those things well, you know. No green thing will grow for miles around Baku, but those Russians have coaxed few trees to sprout in tubes in that tidy little parks and bands far better than I ever heard in Central Park, play you Tschaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakof, not to say Wagner and Verdi and Bizet. And you should se the extraordinary crowds that listen-the Russians, the Persians, the Armenians, the Geogians, the Lesghians, the Tartars, the wild, the swarthy, the fiery, the rainbow colored! My son, when in doubt, go to Baku.