relations disaster for the modern, secular Republic of Turkey of its president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who sought to distance Turkey from the old Ottoman past and the Young Turks who lost most of the empire during World War I. A film version posed an even greater threat. Importance to Armenians, Jews, and other victims of genocide Werfel's novel made him famous among Armenians, according to his biographer, Peter Stephan Jungk. Citing Father Bezdikian, an Armenian priest living in Venice, Italy whose grandfather served and fought during the siege: "Franz Werfel is the national hero of the Armenian people. His great book is a kind of consolation to us—no, not a consolation, there is no such thing—but it is of eminent importance to us that this book exists. It guarantees that it can never be forgotten, never, what happened to our people." Ascherson stated "For Armenians, it remains unique and precious: for all its minor inaccuracies, it’s the one work whose urgency and passion keeps the truth of their genocide before the eyes of a world that would prefer to forget about it." Given the Armenian Diaspora, many ethnic Armenians read the abridged English edition for years, which lacked many of the scenes of Armenian life. With these scenes restored in the revised and expanded edition of 2012, the novel's meaning to Armenians is all the more poignant, as Vartan Gregorian writes in the preface, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was meant as a memorial set against a new historical phenomenon that had been described as the murder of a nation, the extermination of a race, and the assassination of Armenia ... ". The novel, in its expanded form, has even more relevance as a document of genocide. "[I]t is truly remarkable," continues Gregorian, "to consider how closely The Forty Days of Musa Dagh foreshadows the cataclysm that would befall the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe at the hands of the Nazis." As historian and scholar Yair Auron writes, "The reader of this extraordinary novel will find it difficult to believe that the book was written before the Holocaust." Not all Armenians could express their support for the book; some were forced to protest against its publication and any attempt to turn it into a movie, notably the surviving Armenian community of Istanbul, which denounced Werfel's book and burned it in public rituals, similar to contemporary Nazi book burning