The Forty Days of Musa Dagh to be reissued on April 24

PanARMENIAN.Net - Best known for The Song of Bernadette (1941), which was turned into an Oscar-winning movie, Jewish writer Franz Werfel (1890–1945) was also the author of one of the most popular Book-of-the-Month Club titles ever, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Publishers Weekly says.

For the past 10 years, the book has been out-of-print, but publisher David Godine will reissue it next month on Genocide Remembrance Day, April 24, in an uncut $22.95 trade paperback edition translated by James Reidel that restores roughly 25% of the original German text. To underscore the importance of Werfel’s work, Godine is also publishing the first English-language edition of the author’s novella Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand (1940), also translated by Reidel, about an Austrian bureaucrat, his trophy wife, and a Jewish woman from his past.

Although the story of The Forty Days resonated in much of the U.S. and Europe from its initial publication, it was by no means universally embraced. In February 1934, the German government seized copies of the novel, and while Armenians revere the book, the Turks deny that Genocide took place and have tried to undermine it.

In the 1930s, pressure from the Turkish and French governments prevented a film based on the book from being made, and more recently, opposition to the novel swayed Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone to give up on the idea of turning it into a movie. Despite reports that Armenia’s National Film Center is in negotiations with Steven Spielberg and Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillian for a movie based on it to commemorate the centennial of the massacre, a recent article in the Atlantic calls it “unlikely.”

Film or no, Godine is hoping to capture review attention for its new edition, which editor Susan Barba, the granddaughter of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, regards as “my book.” The press delayed publication for two years in order to get it right, making it both the longest novel, and the book with the longest gestation period, published by Godine.