First published in its English translation during World War II in 1944, the first part of this book is composed of lectures originally delivered (in German) during the pre-war period, whilst the second part of the book represents author Franz Werfel’s present point of view, arriving at the difficult conclusion that “complete human detachment is the first psychological symptom of spirituality...” “The outstanding contribution of this book is its frank rejection of the materialistic philosophy and an emphasis in favor of the spiritual interpretation of life. There are beautiful passages written with characteristic artistry.”—Kirkus Review

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is Franz Werfel's masterpiece that brought him international acclaim in 1933, drawing the world's attention to the Armenian genocide. 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 deportation order of the Turkish government. 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 holding out hope for the warships of the Allies to save them. The original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop has been revised and expanded by translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original two-volume 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 gives a fuller picture of the extensive inner lives of the characters, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan"€"and Iskuhi Tomasian, the damaged, nineteen-year-old Armenian woman whom the older Bagradian loves. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, a device he often used in his other novels as well, 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 bringing The Forty Days of Musa Dagh back into print and revising the English translation, we aim to make this new Verba Mundi edition more faithful to the book Thomas Mann read "with pleasure and profit" in German.

A German watchman of sixty-four must live until his sixty-fifth birthday in order that his wife and epileptic son may benefit from his insurance.

This story is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov.

1915 It is a dark year for the Armenian people. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands to the west of the Caspian Sea the Islamic Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Based on actual historical events, this stirring, poignant novel unfolds the story of Gabriel Bagradian -- an Armenian-born officer in the Ottoman army -- and the five thousand Armenian villagers that he leads to the top of Musa Dagh. There, in the Caucasus, on "the mountain of Moses," for forty days these brave Armenians will heroically suffer the siege of Turkish forces hell-bent on their annihilation. Written in the early 1930s and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh remains the only significant treatment, fiction or nonfiction, in any literature, of the first in the twentieth century's long series of holy wars and lamentable inhumanities. Book jacket.

1929. Werfel, Czech-born poet, playwright, and novelist, whose central themes were religious faith, heroism, and human brotherhood. Class Reunion begins: The examining magistrate, Dr. Ernst Sebastian, extinguished his half-smoked cigar. It was his custom not to smoke during office hours, and there was still one case to be heard. It was nearly six o'clock and the sun's rays struck more and more obliquely across the examination-chair, which hulked in front of his writing-table like a stricken man. Sebastian was anxious to hasten matters. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.