The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

＂In every sense a true and thrilling novel.＂--New York Times Book Review

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.

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..