Description
Werfel, Franz [1890-1945]; István Tamás (Trans.). Musa Dagh Negyven Napja [The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in Hungarian] (Two Leatherbound Volumes). Budapest: Nova Irodalmi Intézet, [1941]. pp. 374, 397. 8vo. Quarter maroon leather over marbled boards with gilt rules and lettering; five raised bands to spine, six compartments, silk ribbon markers. Illustrated endpapers. Very light edgewear, some scuffing to the front pastedowns, slight age-toning to pages otherwise contents remain clean and unmarked with tight, sound binding; very good. At time of cataloguing no copies of this particular edition were located on WorldCat. The nearest edition is listed as being published in 1944. Exceedingly scarce. Originally published in German in 1933 by Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel, the novel focuses on the self-defense by a small community of Armenians living near Musa Dagh, a mountain in Vilayet of Aleppo in the Ottoman Empire—now in Hatay Province, part of southern Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast—as well the events in Constantinople (Istanbul) and provincial capitals, where the Young Turk government orchestrated the deportations, concentration camps and massacres of the empire’s Armenian citizens. It achieved great international success and has been credited with awakening the world to the evidence of the persecution and genocide inflicted on the Armenian nation during World War I. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh also foreshadows the Holocaust of World War II due in part to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, which paralleled the novel’s creation. (Shemmassian, Vahram L. “Literature, Film, and Armenian Genocide Denial: The Case of Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” in Between Paris and Fresno: Armenian Studies in Honor of Dickran Kouymjian, ed. Barlow Der Mugrdechian. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2008, pp. 547–69.) Leather Bound. (#949) $245.00
