The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel

It is where Werfel framed his novelization of the first genocide in the 20th century, the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. The name literally means “Moses Mountain” from the Turkish. It is where the real-life Musa Dagh stands, some thirty kilometers from Hatay’s capital of Antakya (to philhellenes, Antioch). The lingering cackle of the dead Ottoman Empire now echoes in the highland valleys of Hatay, a curious patch of land that was once a republic of its own, now bordering Syria in Turkey’s furthest eastern Mediterranean region.

I eyed the thick, brittle spine of Franz Werfel’s best-known classic, a book that continues to set off sparks in the ongoing conflict to reconcile Turkish and Armenian wartime traumas unfaded by over a century of epochal paradigm shifts. I had returned there, to my childhood stomping grounds, from Istanbul, and walked up to the obscure, dark treasure trove I had known and loved with my bookish factory worker of a Manhattan-born Greek Jewish grandfather whose parents were Ottoman subjects.

Like a wise recluse, he sits faithfully behind his cluttered desk piled high from the ground with tomes that surpass all sense of secondhand, or thirdhand use, having, by appearances, passed through more hands than that possessed by the Hindu god Shiva. The storied literary shop, in fact, is called Upstairs, down a side street around the corner from the historic drag of Union Street, and fronted by a very thin and most eccentric middle-aged, irreligious Jewish man named Ira whose encyclopedic grasp of his bulging, towering shelves is only less incredible than the strength of the cracking, musty, dusty floorboards. The junk-shooting, painkiller-popping populace has since drunk and bled its nostalgic local economy dry under the noir-stained, 19th century lampposts and ship-building mills that once hosted the likes of the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas and a then-unknown Abraham Lincoln. I bought a worn copy of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh for $1.10 from a walkup used bookstore in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the old glory of American fishing ports where Herman Melville set sail to write Moby Dick during the industrial city’s heyday when oil money meant the blood of whales.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel