Werfel was devastated by the loss of his German readership, but the novel was soon published in an English translation in November 1934, which sold 34,000 copies in the first two weeks. This translation by Geoffrey Dunlop omitted scenes of violence and rape that Dunlop believed would cause anxiety in readers in the United States and the United Kingdom and descriptions of the culture and society of the Armenians. According to Ascherson, Werfel was only interested in collecting the royalties paid from the translations and that otherwise he did not care what happened to the English version, and that the public at the time did not draw attention to the abridgement.