The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

by Franz Werfel, Geoffrey Dunlop (Translator)

Overview

1915 It is a dark year for the Armenian people. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands to the west of the Caspian Sea the Islamic Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Based on actual historical events, this stirring, poignant novel unfolds the story of Gabriel Bagradian -- an Armenian-born officer in the Ottoman army -- and the five thousand Armenian villagers that he leads to the top of Musa Dagh. There, in the Caucasus, on "the mountain of Moses," for forty days these brave Armenians will heroically suffer the siege of Turkish forces hell-bent on their annihilation. Written in the early 1930s and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh remains the only significant treatment, fiction or nonfiction, in any literature, of the first in the twentieth century's long series of holy wars and lamentable inhumanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567928211
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	11/18/2025
Pages:	936
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.97(d)

About the Author

Franz Werfel was one of Austria’s most renowned writers at the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, the humanist, anti-genocide stance he expressed in works such as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, as well as his Jewish heritage, attracted the censure of the Nazis. His books were among the many that were burned amidst accusations of conspiracy and decadence. In 1940, Werfel fled to the United States via France and Spain and settled in Los Angeles..

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
Book 1	Coming Events
1.	Teskere	3
2.	Konak--Hamam--Selamlik	22
3.	The Notables of Yoghonoluk	41
4.	The First Incident	65
5.	Interlude of the Gods	123
6.	The Great Assembly	152
7.	The Funeral of the Bells	236
Book 2	The Struggle of the Weak
1.	Life on the Mountain	295
2.	The Exploits of the Boys	338
3.	The Procession of Fire	395
4.	Sato's Ways	483
Book 3	Disaster, Rescue, the End
1.	Interlude of the Gods	529
2.	Stephan Sets Out and Returns	566
3.	Pain	612
4.	Decline and Temptation	637
5.	The Altar Flame	679
6.	The Script in the Fog	754
7.	To the Inexplicable in Us and Above Us!	811
	List of Characters	819
	Glossary of Armenian and Turkish Terms	821

Editorial Reviews

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh will invade your senses and keep the blood pounding. Once read, it will never be forgotten.”
—New York Times

“A faithful and vivid recount of the Armenian genocide and the Musa Dagh community’s resistance. But it is more than just a story recounting that particular chapter of history. Before genocide became conceptualized by post-war academics, Werfel first captured the essences of modern state violence with his penetrating perception, and he was able to put his keen observation in the novel. Reading the book will allow readers to gain a more profound understanding of modern state violence and its nature. This timeless classic will retain its relevancy as long as the world is shadowed by the threat of genocide.”
—Yale Review of International Studies

“Werfel's book ... did more than the efforts of any diplomat, journalist, or historian to encourage speech about the unspeakable. It arrives today as a timely reminder that savagery thrives in silence.”
—Barnes and Noble Review

“A crackling read. Symphonic in its handling of profound themes.”
—Booklist

“For Armenians, it remains unique and precious...it’s the one work whose urgency and passion keeps the truth of their genocide before the eyes of a world that would prefer to forget about it. For Jewish readers, Werfel’s epic about the choice between submitting to the killers or dying on the barricade is still poignant. In several ghettos where the Nazis held Jewish populations before murdering them, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was passed from hand to hand and became the inspiration—almost the manual—for the sacrificial ghetto risings that followed. Werfel wins an argument with the world’s indifference—and wins it crushingly.”
—London Review of Books

“In every sense a true and thrilling novel....It tells a story which it is almost one’s duty as an intelligent human being to read. And one’s duty here becomes one's pleasure also.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Werfel expresses his unequivocal admonishment on the subject of genocide through a wise and beneficent character, the Muslim sage Agha Rifaat Bereket who is the first to warn of the atrocities....As the demonic impulse to genocide captivated Werfel’s own countrymen, he wrote with an uncanny, intuitive premonition enough to chill the bones of readers for all time. To end with Werfel’s immortal words: ‘The most horrible thing that had been done was, not that a whole people had been exterminated, but that a whole people, God’s children, had been dehumanised.’”
—Bosphorus Review of Books

From the Publisher