The Forty Days of Musa Dagh Book Reviews

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel Book Summary

The internationally acclaimed novel based on the heroic resistance during the Armenian genocide of 1915.

This is the story of how the people of several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria chose not to obey the Turkish government’s deportation order. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh—Mount Moses—and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while hoping for the Allies to save them . . .

Translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz have revised and expanded the original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation. The restoration of these passages and their new translation provide a fuller picture of the characters’ lives, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan, and Iskuhi Tomasian. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, in which the author, his wife Alma, his stepdaughter Manon Gropius, and others in his circle are reinvented. Reidel has also revised the existing translation to free Werfel’s stronger usages from Dunlop’s softening of meaning, his effective censoring of the novel in order to fit the mores and commercial contingencies of the mid-1930s.

“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

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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Franz Werfel) Book Reviews 2024

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