The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Originally Published as Die Vierzig Tage Des Musa Dagh)

First American edition. Lacks jacket. Spine faded, boards faintly soiled, pencil name on verso of front endpaper. 1934 Hard Cover. viii, 824 pp. 8vo. Maps on endpapers. Translated into English from the original German by Geoffrey Dunlop. A historical novel based on the events of the Armenian battle of Musa Dagh in 1915, this book was suppressed to a certain degree by the Hitler regime. Sylvester Stallone has expressed an interest in writing and directing a screenplay based on this book. "This stirring, poignant novel, based on real historical events that made of actual people true heroes, unfolds the tragedy that befell the Armenian people in the dark year of 1915. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Unable to deny his birthright or his people, one man, Gabriel Bagradian - born an Armenian, educated in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman, and an officer doing his duty as a Turkish subject in the Ottoman army - will strive to resist death at the hands of his blood enemy by leading 5,000 Armenian villagers to the top of Musa Dagh, "the mountain of Moses." There, for forty days, in the face of almost certain death, they will suffer the siege of a Turkish army hell-bent on genocide. A passionate warning against the dangers of racism and scapegoating, and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, this important novel from the early 1930s remains the only significant treatment, in fiction or nonfiction, of the first genocide in the twentieth century's long series of inhumanities.…