4/29/2023 0 Comments Exodus reduxAs Silver notes with an eye for its inherent paradox, one of Uris?s key achievements was to ?make the Zionist idea of the ?negation of the Diaspora? wildly popular among Diaspora Jews themselves.?Īmong these Diaspora Jews negated by Uris were his own literary contemporaries. Uris made no personal sacrifice beyond his own early military service, and certainly made no individual aliyah. The old ghetto Jews who reacted passively to their tormentors had no license to live in Uris?s imaginative world? Hitler?s victims deserved their fates because they were not Zionists.?Įven Anne Frank gets little sympathy from Uris, as he writes in a 1958 letter to his father after seeing the Broadway production of ?The Diary of Anne Frank?: ?I do not like to see Jews hiding in attics, and feel there is something far more decent about dying in dignity which is, of course, the choice that every Jew had.? This type of macho ?Inglourious Basterds?-style expectation came from a pop-fiction author firmly ensconced in his California seaside home, and later in a Colorado ski chalet. ![]() ![]() ![]() As Israeli sociologist Oz Almog pointed out in ?The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew? (University of California Press, 2000), in the 1950s many Israelis looked upon Holocaust survivors with empathy ?accompanied by an ?I told you so? attitude.? In ?Exodus,? Uris omits most of the empathy, instead directing an accusatory glare at Diaspora Jewry, inspired by his own despisal of his father as a failed ?shtetl Jew.? As Silver cogently argues: ?Exodus? narrative rewarded only those Jews who engaged in Guadalcanal-type acts of heroic resistance against the Nazis. Image by POSTER ABOVE FROM DOCTOR MACRO, PHOTO BELOW COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF TExAS PRESSĪs Silver notes, despite its obvious subject matter ? Israel?s founding ? the novel ?Exodus? is not principally ?about? Israel, but instead deals more generally with ?Jewish empowerment? in the post-Holocaust world. Nadel, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, confessed that he was motivated to write Uris?s biography to find out, ?How could one who wrote so ineptly still find such a wide and persistent audience?īorn To Fight: Soldier Ari Ben Canaan (above, on left) and cowboy Leon Uris (pictured below with his wife Jill Peabody) were exemplary of a certain understanding of how Jewish identity needed to be fought for. In the tradition of best-sellers by such contemporaries as Harold Robbins (born Rubin) and Sidney Sheldon (born Schechtel), Uris wrote about types, not real people. The protagonist of ?Exodus,? Ari Ben Canaan, is an action hero repeatedly described as ?hard and powerful? and braver ?than an ordinary human being.? Surrounding Ari are ?tough and tender? Sabras who fearlessly fight with him for a homeland. Marines who created best-sellers from stereotypes, not by mastering the finer points of fictional art. Why the delay?Ī half century was probably needed to acquire a clear perspective on Uris, a bellicose, two-fisted veteran of the U. Yet only now have two full-length studies appeared about the book and its author: ?Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller,? a biography by Ira Nadel, and ?Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story? by M.M. The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to composer Ernest Gold?s triumphant brassy soundtrack, significantly altered the way Americans, and the rest of the world, see the State of Israel. ![]() University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story
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