during the course of a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch the incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian people from the Hell of all that had taken place. The writing of the book followed between July 1932 and March 1933. Meanwhile, in November, on a lecture tour through German cities, the author selected Chapter 5 of Book One for public readings. It was read in its present form, based on the historic records of a conversation between Enver Pasha and Pastor Johannes Lepsius. Werfel does not mention here that he rewrote much of the novel in May 1933, responding to events in Nazi Germany and kept revising it up until it was published. Later, speaking to reporters, Werfel elaborated: "The struggle of 5,000 people on Musa Dagh had so fascinated me that I wished to aid the Armenian people by writing about it and bringing it to the world." Book One: Coming Events Werfel's narrative style is omniscient as well as having a "polyfocus", in which he moves the perspective from character to character and to the third person perspective. For that reason, the connection between the author's consciousness and that of his characters can almost read seamlessly. This is evident as the novel opens in the spring of 1915, during the second year of the World War I. Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian from Paris, has returned to his native village of Yoghonoluk, one of seven villages in Aleppo Vilayet, now Hatay Province, Turkey. (Bagradian's character was inspired by the figure of , whose Armenian first name was the same as that of the mountain.) His view is dominated by a familiar and looming presence in this paradisiac landscape—Musa Dagh—which means Mount Moses in Turkish (Musa Ler is the Armenian for Mount Moses). He thinks about his return to settle the affairs of his dead older brother and entertains pleasant reveries of his childhood, as well as more serious matters. Bagradian feels both proud and estranged from his Armenian roots, and throughout the novel Werfel develops this theme of estrangement, which is denoted with the book's first sentence, the question: ″How did I get here?″ Bagradian also considers his French wife Juliette and their son Stephan, and how they will adjust to their new environment, given the state of war that now