Franz Werfel

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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

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Forty Days will invade your senses and keep the blood pounding. Once read, it will never be forgotten

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

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

A crackling read. Symphonic in its handling of profound themes, respectful of its most vacillating characters, Werfel's novel is a grand and satisfying story about the necessities and difficulties of leadership

Franz Werfel's masterpiece tells the true story of the inhabitants of six Armenian villages on the mountain of Musa Dagh, who choose to defy the deportation order of the Turkish government and are subsequently besieged on the mountainside. Told through the eyes of Gabriel Bagradian, a cosmopolitan Armenian who has returned to his home village with his French wife and son after years living in Europe, the novel is a rich and dramatic epic that powerfully argues for the value of resistance even in impossible circumstances.

'Musa Dagh stood beyond the world. No storm would reach it, even if one should break' 
 
It is 1915 and Gabriel has returned to his childhood home, an Armenian village on the slopes of Musa Dagh. But things are becoming increasingly dangerous for his people in Turkey, and, as the government orders round-ups and deportations, the villagers of Musa Dagh decide to fight back. The seminal novel of the Armenian genocide, Franz Werfel's bestselling 1933 epic brought the catastrophe to the world's attention for the first time, and has become a talismanic story of resistance in the face of hatred. 
 
'Forty Days will invade your senses and keep the blood pounding. Once read, it will never be forgotten' The New York Times 
 
Translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel

Franz Werfel (born 1890) was already a successful writer when in 1933 he published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, inspired by the desperate plight of Armenian children he had seen working in a Syrian carpet factory. A bestseller and Werfel's masterpiece, the book brought the Armenian genocide to the world's attention for the first time but was burned by the Nazis. Werfel, an Austrian Jew, was forced to flee Europe, narrowly escaping with his life. He died in Los Angeles in 1945.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

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Forty Days will invade your senses and keep the blood pounding. Once read, it will never be forgotten

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

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

A crackling read. Symphonic in its handling of profound themes, respectful of its most vacillating characters, Werfel's novel is a grand and satisfying story about the necessities and difficulties of leadership

About Franz Werfel

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