The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

By Franz Werfel
Translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel

“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

“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

The heroic story of resistance during the Armenian genocide.

When the Turkish government ordered the deportation of Armenians, several villages in the mountains chose not to obey. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope that the warships of the Allies would save them.

An international bestseller when first published in 1933, and the first novel in modern times to capture genocide by a state, Franz Werfel's masterpiece brought the world's attention to this devastating crime against humanity and the Armenian people.

Paperback
936 Pages
Verba Mundi, 2025
Originally published in 1933
5.5 x 1.97 x 8.5 inches
ISBN 9781567928211
Literature, History