In all directions we are surrounded by history.
—LEON URIS, EXODUS
IT MAY HAVE ARRIVED when an American tourist handed a copy to a Jew while standing on a train platform in Lithuania. Or when the son of the Israeli consul general in Leningrad passed it on to a group of dissidents. Or when a German copy, secretly sent to refuseniks in Riga, began to appear in a Russian translation, which took an hour a page to type and nearly a year to complete. No matter how it got there or what form it took, Exodus in its samizdat (self-published) version became an underground Russian classic of the seventies that led, in the words of one refusenik, to “the national rebirth of Jewish youth in the Soviet Union.”1
The story of Leonid Feldman from Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union, highlights the danger.2 He was astonished when he heard that his sister’s boyfriend had been arrested for reading a book. Although unsure of the title, he decided to read the book himself. Three years later, he waited one night at eleven in a dark corner of a park. He was handed a heavy briefcase. “Take a taxi and go home, but you must return with the manuscript to this spot by seven a.m., finished or not,” said the courier. “No one must know what you’ve done.” No one told him that reading it was dangerous. No one told him the title; it was known only as “the book.” “Have you seen ‘the book’?” “Who’s got ‘the book’?” many would quietly ask.
Feldman, a former chess champion, was then a twenty-one-year-old high school physics teacher. “The book,” however, changed his life: he could explain the principles of relativity but not Abraham and Isaac. He had never heard of the Torah and didn’t know Jews had been around for 4,000 years. From “the book” he learned of the Holocaust and that Hitler had hated Jews and Russians. Angry when he ended his reading because his government had lied to him and taught him to hate himself, he became a different man.
“When I finished that book, I was another Leonid Feldman,” he declared in 1988. The book led to an application for immigration, a refusal, a confrontation with the KGB, prison, a hunger strike, and finally freedom. Travel to Israel and America followed, as well as study at the Jewish Theological Seminary and ordination as the first Conservative rabbi from the Soviet Union. He credited Uris for “making me a free and a happy man.”
Persecution was not limited to the 1970S. In 1985, Leonid Volvovsky was convicted of slander for distributing anti-Soviet literature, namely, Exodus. Several months earlier, a Hebrew teacher in Odessa had received a similar sentence. For Soviet Jewish activists, Exodus was more meaningful than the Bible, read not as literature but as history. To honor the work, Russian Jews titled one of their earliest underground samizdat typewritten publications Ishkod, the Russian word for “exodus.”3
The translations, of course, varied, since each translator’s knowledge of English or German could range from the rudimentary to the sophisticated. Many translations were inaccurate and incomplete. One version by ideological Zionists entirely dropped the love affair between Kitty and Ari because they could not accept a Jew having a romance with a non-Jew. The samizdat editions were also remarkably uneven in their appearances: sections were typed on different kinds of paper and in different typefaces, because different typewriters had to be used to avoid detection (all typewriters were registered with officials; owning an unregistered private typewriter was then illegal in the Soviet Union). Private citizens could not own duplicating machines either, so carbon paper, difficult to obtain, was used, but burned each night after a page or two had been translated. Bindings were often simple, and translations frequently lacked a title page. It was considered reckless as well as dangerous to be circulating a censored book—hence, its designation as “the book.”4
An Israeli who served in the embassy in Moscow from 1959 to 1962 reported that he and other members of the staff gave away many copies of the paperback version of the novel after it appeared in 1959.5 Copies arrived through diplomatic pouches as part of a Mossad operation. This important edition included a statement by Uris on the novel (the statement was dropped from later reprints). Emphasizing the miracle of the rebirth of a nation, Uris celebrates the heroic restoration of a people and a land in colorful prose. Exodus, he writes, “tells the story of the Jews coming back after centuries of abuse, indignities, torture and murder to carve an oasis in the sand with guts and blood.” Exodus, he emphasizes, is “about fighting people, people who do not apologize either for being born Jews or the right to live in human dignity.”6 No one opening the book could overlook this declaration, which preceded the title page.
Surprisingly, Exodus did not begin with Uris but with a vice president of MGM, Dore Schary. A former screenwriter who had won an Academy Award for the 1938 hit Boys Town, Schary was a politically active Jew who had lectured on anti-Semitism to soldiers during the Second World War. In the early forties, he rose through the ranks at MGM, but quit when the studio rejected his attempt to make a parable about Hitler and Mussolini in the form of a western. Schary was a religious Jew at a time when most Jewish studio executives hid their faith; he also strongly supported Jewish organizations.7
By the mid-1950s, some seven years after he returned to MGM, now as vice president of production, he thought it was time for someone to write the story of the new state of Israel—which he, of course, would then film. At the time—1955—Uris’s agent Malcolm Stuart of the Preminger-Stuart agency (Otto Preminger’s brother Ingo was a partner) was visiting studios to seek funding for a Uris film project loosely related to the new country. Stuart had proposed the idea of writing on Israel to Uris one day at lunch. Ingo Preminger then suggested that Uris go to Israel to conduct research.8 Schary knew Uris was a novelist who was making a name for himself as a screenwriter, or, as he preferred to be called, “Hollywood writer.” It was a match.
Uris had sensed the dramatic possibilities of the story of Israel from his writing about the Palestine Brigade—Jewish fighters for the British—in The Angry Hills. However, he at first thought the topic too complex and vast. He also lacked a formal Jewish education, did not read or speak Hebrew, and was not even a bar mitzvah. But he wanted “to find the anatomy of a miracle,” the rebirth of Israel, and when Schary offered him $7,500 as an option for the as yet unwritten narrative, tentatively titled “The Big Dream,” Uris felt confident enough to undertake the project—with implicit support from Random House for a possible book on the topic.9 He signed a contract with MGM in January 1956—although in the round-robin of studio politics, Schary was fired from the studio nine months later, partly because he was a politically active “egghead.”10 When informed of his firing by the new head of Loews, which then owned MGM, Schary offered another reason for letting him go: he was studying conversational Hebrew.11
Uris had initially put off writing the story of Israel because of the amount of preparation and information needed to do the job. But he began to learn more about the country, starting with a meeting with Netanel Lorch, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles and later author of Edge of the Sword: Israel’s War of Independence, 1947–1949 (1961). He also began to amass a large reference library and soon felt he could do the work with proper support and preparation. Battle Cry had grown out of his immediate experience, and The Angry Hills from his uncle’s autobiography; Exodus would emerge initially from study, reading, and travel. He spent three and a half months reading nearly 300 books, immersing himself in the history and politics of the region. He also gave up smoking and undertook a new, though modest, regime of physical training: daily tennis with an instructor.12
At the start of his work, Uris was still unsure whether he should continue with the well-paying career of a screenwriter or seek the more lasting (but less lucrative) career of a novelist. He decided to finesse both by accepting the movie option for a screenplay-book yet to be written. This way he could have his Hollywood income precede his royalty advance and then use it to fund his trip, while also ensuring the existence of a film whether or not the book was a success. He also recognized that whereas a reputation as a screenwriter would be inadequate for his ego, being known as a writer might ensure some longer-term popularity. He also felt he needed to resurrect a faltering career as a novelist after the dismal reception of The Angry Hills. A novel about Israel might be the answer.
Uris also had a personal motive for writing the book: the reexamination of his own Jewishness. Until then, he had never identified strongly with Judaism or religion. The history of the Jews meant something to him culturally, but not spiritually and certainly not personally. But the image of the “soft” Jew angered him, and he was determined to replace it with one of strength. He undertook to recast Jews as tough and resilient heroes rather than submissive victims. This was a projection of his own self-image as a battle-tested marine, independent character, and outspoken defender of justice. And if necessary, he would never turn away from a fight. As his father commented in an interview shortly after Exodus appeared, “He was a strange boy. I have never known such will power.”13
The narrative Uris constructed of the Israeli past—the resistance of the Israelis to British and Arab aggression (Uris always linked the two)—confirmed his belief in Jewish strength. He undertook to do no less than remake the image of the Jew in the post-Holocaust world. But he also realized that to succeed, he had to create a dramatic and universal story that would appeal to a non-Jewish world, especially in America.
But the story would be his, in both its passion and its identity. The image of the freedom fighter on the book jacket of Exodus expressed Uris’s own tough and aggressive self-image. This took emblematic form when he later had the wrought-iron gate to his Aspen, Colorado, home shaped into the figure, bordered by two Stars of David. In a not so subtle a way, Uris signaled to visitors that he, too, was cast in this manner. The Saul Bass logo for the film Exodus—four arms reaching up in the air with a fifth holding a rifle—would be equally powerful.
In an early letter to his mother, Uris tells her that he has learned how to fight, something that Israel, a country of fighters, mirrored.14 Ever since joining the marines, he had seen himself in this way. “I was tough. I used everything to my advantage. I could be ruthless. I hurt a lot of people on the way up,” Uris boldly told an Associated Press interviewer some years later.15 He was also inspired to write the novel because he was “thrilled by the Israeli army. Jews in the field kicking hell out of somebody. They’d stopped apologizing for being Jews. I wanted to stop apologizing too. I wanted to write an affirmative and aggressive book about the Jewish People.”16
From the outset, Uris was clear about his audience as well as purpose: “I am not writing this book for the Jews or the Zionists. I am writing this book for the American people in hopes I can present it in such a way that Israel gets what she needs badly … understanding.”17 Once committed to the project, Uris read histories, memoirs, government reports, autobiographies, and the complete transcript of the Nuremberg war-crime trials. He also spent time making contacts, initially through the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Uris saturated himself with accounts of Judaism and the history of Israel before he left, reading stories of the Irgun (a militant Zionist group that operated in British Palestine) as well as the efforts to establish the Israeli army.
Exodus was not, of course, the first novel to deal with the establishment of the state or the history of the Jews.18 Earlier novels had presented the refugee problem, the life of the early settlers, Zionism, and the fight with the Arabs. Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night (1946) and Zelda Popkin’s Quiet Street (1951) are two of the earliest, although Meyer Levin’s Yehuda (1931) was the first fictional account of life on a kibbutz in modern Palestine. Koestler’s work, subtitled Chronicle of an Experiment, focused on Arab and Jewish tensions before the British withdrawal and partially builds on the years 1926–1929, when Koestler lived in Palestine, first as a farm laborer and then as a correspondent. Uris was aware of the book, citing it as one of the few that deeply engages with the problems of the region.
Exodus differs from these earlier efforts in a number of ways: Uris prepared extensively before he departed for Israel; he had Israeli support during his visit; he was determined to set the rebirth of Israel within the larger context of Jewish history and immigration; and, perhaps most importantly, he wrote for non-Jewish readers and against the stereotype of the victimized Jew. Uris also worked hard to publish the novel on the tenth anniversary of the state, thereby gaining immediate publicity and sales for his work (he missed the date by only three months). But it appeared at a time—September 1958—when Jewish writers were being embraced by the mainstream American readers.
In May 1956, just after he arrived in Israel—Uris landed on 13 April 1956 via Copenhagen and Rome—he outlined his approach to the story to his father. He sought to correct romantic visions of the country and its heroes: “I must caution you again. I am writing a book for Americans … Gentiles … not for the Jews…. I must show her as a human place and not an ultra-glorious utopia…. The real Israel … is a nation of young Marines … The fighter knows Israel was won by a gun and it will be saved by a gun…. The spirit of Israel is the strength of her fighters.”19
Israel welcomed Uris as a minor celebrity. He was known to the public as the author of Battle Cry, and his standing was enhanced when a special showing of the film took place in Jerusalem two weeks after he landed. Uris attended and donated a number of autographed copies of the novel. In the advertisements for the event, he was identified as “Leon Uris-Yerushalmy,” a reversion to his father’s original name. An invitation from the U.S. ambassador to Israel to attend a Fourth of July celebration was typical of the reception he received. But sometimes his prominence worked against him. At a gathering of some five hundred at the Edison Cinema in Jerusalem, for years a site of secular European and Zionist culture and one of the largest movie houses in the city, the audience questioned him about his work and that of other leading twentieth-century novelists. He admitted he hadn’t read them. “Uris was no intellectual,” Ilan Hartuv, his Israeli guide, who was present at the evening, recalled.20
A former mayor of Kiryat Shmona, Hartuv came from a family of first pioneers. However, a quarrel with Golda Meir, then labor minister, led to his resignation as mayor, but he did join the Labour Ministry itself and then the Ministry of the Interior. Soon he was transferred to a junior post in the Foreign Ministry, where he was assigned to assist Uris in his research and travel. During the eight months they spent together, Hartuv acted as translator, secretary, and facilitator. He was not, however, a driver. Uris preferred to do that himself.
Uris was eager to meet military commanders and see battlefields. Hartuv suggested that he also meet Arabs and Druze (members of an Islamic sect, mainly in Israel, Lebanon, and Syria). Hartuv also introduced him to Moshe Pearlman, himself a widely published author (The Army of Israel [1950] among other titles) and for a short while the army spokesman. At the time, Pearlman was working for Teddy Kollek, who was soon to become executive director of the prime minister’s office. Uris even had a late-night meeting with Yigdal Allon, a former Palmach commander (the Palmach was the strike force of the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces).
Hartuv facilitated Uris’s meeting a number of important fighters and leaders of the country, beginning with Joseph (Yosefle) Tabenkin, a former Palmach commander of the Harel Brigade who was instrumental in securing a route to Jerusalem in 1948, which allowed supplies to be brought to the city under siege. Yigael Yadin, the second chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, was another source, as was Moshe Dayan, the defense minister, although Uris’s four-hour meeting with Dayan became no more than a long critique of the prime minister, Moshe Sharett. (Sharett was not interested in meeting Uris.) Uris and Hartuv learned more about Dayan from meetings with his sister and parents.
Uris also spent time with Shumel Tamir, a lawyer. Tamir had had a prominent role in the Irgun, taking part in operations against many British targets, notably the February 1944 attack on the income tax offices in Jerusalem. In 1946, he was deputy commander of the Jerusalem district and in charge of the Irgun intelligence unit in Jerusalem. Uris also briefly met Golda Meir. At all of these interviews, Uris took notes, using a tape recorder only to record his own personal impressions of events.21
Hartuv taught Uris about Israeli history but could not get him to correct his intentional errors. The attack on the prison at Acre, which led to the rescue of Akiva and Dov Landau in the novel, was the most egregious (EX, 438–448). ETZEL (the Irgun) led the actual attack, but in the novel, Uris blends the group into the Maccabees, led by the Haganah commander Ari Ben Canaan. This would never have happened. Uris knew it was incorrect but insisted on attributing the action to his hero: he needed to show him in command. After the release of the film, Hartuv had to meet with Menachem Begin, the former commander of the Irgun, to calm both him and a delegation. He explained that although the actual group that did the deed was obscured, “you come out quite well” in the movie and book.22
Hartuv took Uris to Cyprus, where they met a Cypriot merchant in Farmagusta, Prodromos Papavassiliou, who had helped Jews escape from British deportation camps and reach Israel (he is Mandria in the novel). “Papa,” as he was known, offered assistance to the more than 52,384 Jewish refugees interned in the camps between 1946 and 1949.23 Hartuv later returned to Cyprus with Otto Preminger for the filming of Exodus, and subsequently worked with Uris on Mila 18 and Exodus Revisited.24
Uris drove, walked, and even flew for his research. One of his most exciting trips was a secret flight to bring out refugees from Yemen, which he makes the focus of Chapter One of Book 5 of Exodus. To his father, he wrote that they flew into Iran and returned: “The big moment was when the plane sighted Israel. Whooping, applause and crying … quite touching. These people were from deep in the hills and very backward.”25
By June 1956, Uris had finished most of his travels, although he still had to go to the Negev, which proved to be one of his most memorable adventures. The first American to be taken on a patrol of the desert (where the temperature hit 120 degrees), he joined a squad of sixteen Israeli paratroopers. The route was through ravines and wadis, over slate fields and mountains, crisscrossing the path of Moses and the Twelve Tribes along the Egyptian and Jordanian borders toward Eilat. The journey was so memorable that he later recounted it in Mitla Pass. But there was also plenty of danger during Uris’s visit: a bomb went off outside his hotel window in Nicosia, he was shot at by Arabs in Jerusalem, and he was only seven miles from a major battle on Israel’s border with Jordan.26
With his research almost complete, Uris set himself up in a third-floor studio overlooking the Mediterranean at the Accadia Grand Hotel in Herzlia. The hotel, proud to have the writer, donated the room, which he transformed into an office. Its balcony overlooked the sea, and it was there he began to sift through his notes, taped interviews, and slides. Uris had photographed wherever he went, and he used these images to refresh his eye when writing about episodes and landscape. After his return to the States, he would often show friends slides of his travels around Israel. In total, he would cite (allowing for some exaggeration) twelve thousand miles traveled, almost two thousand interviews, two miles of recording tape, 1,500 photographs and more than six hundred pages of notes, all from Israeli sources.27
But in midsummer 1956, there were still further interviews and research to conduct and people to see, although he hoped to be home, he told his father, by mid-July.28 However, he soon realized he needed more time in Israel and decided that he wanted to write the story there. Staying in Israel was important for Uris because he could continue his research and write with the conviction and authenticity he needed in order to complete the novel. He asked Betty to fly over with their three children and their dog, Duffy.
He also grew more confident about his story and approach: “I believe it will be like a breath of spring air for the American people to meet Mr. Avi [sic] Ben Canaan, the fighting Jew who won’t take shit from nobody … who fears nobody. He will be a departure from the Mailer … Morningstar apologetics.”29 The work of Jerome Weidman (Enemy Camp) and Meyer Levin was also an anathema to Uris, who wanted to underscore the aggressive Jew, the strong Jew. Levin’s The Old Bunch (1937) and more recently Compulsion (1956), about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, contradicted Uris’s perception of Jews as active and forceful.30
The arrival of Betty, with Karen (age ten), Mark (six) and Michael (four), on 2 August 1956 meant a new phase of life for Uris, who had located a home for the family on the edge of the Sharon Valley near Tel Aviv but close to the Accadia Hotel. Surprisingly, Betty and the children adjusted easily, and she also took up home teaching duties, instructing Karen and Mark. Most of their neighbors were South Africans, and the husbands were away in the army. The situation seemed ideal—with the Mediterranean behind them, the Sharon Valley in front, and green surrounding their home—at least for three months.
But Betty was indifferent to her husband. The likely cause was her suspicion that he had a girlfriend. In fact, he had several; the first and longest affair was with an Israeli who worked as a flight attendant for a Czech airline. Uris met this woman through a taxi driver–tour guide named Hans and carried on with her for several months, spending long hours with her at his hotel and seeing her at every opportunity. He wanted her to move to America, and eventually arranged for her to immigrate to Chicago. She went, although she had little more to do with Uris.31
Uris’s behavior in Israel occasionally led to controversy. During a trip to Eilat, he met a woman in a restaurant and soon took her back to his hotel room. When Hartuv returned later to the hotel, the management anxiously greeted him outside. “Something terrible has happened,” they told him. “Uris has a woman in his room!” Histadrut, the Israeli national labor union, which owned the hotel, did not condone such behavior. The manager insisted Hartuv act. What could he do? He rang Uris and explained the situation. Uris promised that the girl would be gone in a few minutes. Nearly an hour later, she left.32
Uris’s only unsuccessful conquest was his attempt to seduce the head of a bureau in the Defense Department. The woman wouldn’t hear of Uris’s propositions, because she was most likely involved with Moshe Dayan, who was known for such pursuits. On another occasion, a woman Uris admired asked for a room adjacent to his at the Accadia. It was eagerly arranged, but to his disappointment, she simply wanted a water view to enjoy a weekend with her husband.33
In September 1956, Uris wrote a full description of his progress to his editor: it was time to let him know “what the hell is going on with the Kosher Battle Cry (as Dore Schary has dubbed it).”34 He described his family situation and his free room at the Hotel Accadia, which was furnished “to my working tastes. I have a balcony overlooking the sea…. I am hoping to take one or two breaks during the writing of the book to kick over a few quick money magazine articles.” In the lengthy and detailed summary that followed, he expressed confidence in the quality of his work.
At ten o’clock on a Monday night in late October, he heard a radio bulletin: “Israeli paratroopers have landed near the Suez Canal.” At first, he and Betty felt no direct danger and decided to take things day by day. But by the following afternoon, events were moving swiftly, and as fighting raged in the Sinai Peninsula, the American government warned its nationals to leave.
Fighting continued until 7 November, when Prime Minister Ben-Gurion gave a victory speech in the Knesset, although pressure on Israel by the United Nations, the Soviet Union, and the United States not to hold the occupied land led to a partial withdrawal, which was announced the next day. In March, Israel left the occupied land, replaced by UN forces, although passage through the Straits of Tiran had been established with Eilat becoming an open port, significant for its allowing the development of the Negev and the building of an oil pipeline between Eilat and Beersheva.
Uris, of course, had no idea of the big picture. On Monday, November 5, he went to Tel Aviv to investigate a possible escape but all outbound airlines were booked for weeks and commercial flights were discouraged because of the danger of Egyptian bombing. Fear of his family being trapped made him anxious, and late in the afternoon he went to visit Sholem Asch, the distinguished eighty-year-old Yiddish writer then living at Bat Yam. “I did not bargain for putting my family in danger and losing two years’ worth of work,” he told him. Asch replied, “The book will be written if you are the kind of writer I think you are.” “Will you leave?” Uris asked. “This is where I belong. I am a Jew and a writer,” Asch answered.35
But Uris had to get his family out: if there was any chance of danger to the children, they and Betty had to leave. He would stay behind and try and report on developments. Uris then contacted the U.S. embassy, and was told by his friend Colonel David Peterson, an air attaché, that he should depart. For the rest of the day, Uris and Betty debated whether to go or stay, but on Monday night, tension increased as Israeli troops tore across the Sinai. Tuesday morning, the embassy advised all Americans to depart, and he drove to Tel Aviv to book a flight out, but there was no space. At three he was in Colonel Peterson’s office, where he was given a memo authorizing him to get the family on a U.S. rescue flight. It tersely read: “Please assist Mr. Leon Uris to complete arrangements for the evacuation of Mrs. Uris and her three children.” But before Betty Uris and the children could go, she had to sign a statement saying she accepted transportation provided by the United States government “on a reimbursable and space available basis.”36
Overnight, Israel went from peace to war with “terrifying efficiency,” as Uris wrote in a dispatch to the Philadelphia Inquirer (written on Accadia Hotel stationery) during the fighting.37 Men quickly departed to designated assembly areas and moved silently to the borders as cars and buses came off the roads to clear the way for military transports. Colonel Peterson had told Uris that four Globemaster cargo planes were expected from Germany that night and that he and the children should get to Lydda Airport immediately for evacuation.38 This time there was little hesitation. By candlelight, the family rapidly packed what they could into their marine seabags and in a blackout drove toward the airport, Karen having painted out the headlights on their car. Before they left, Uris wrote out a series of cables for Betty to send when they arrived safely. In less than an hour, they loaded their Austin and headed to Lydda, which was difficult to locate even in daylight.
They arrived to join hundreds of others in the dimly lit terminal, where suitcases and people were piled high. There seemed to be little hope during the six or seven hours of waiting. Karen and Mike dozed, but Mark, age six, began to cry. Uris took him aside and explained to him how wonderful it was to be an American and “so important that they would send a real army airplane all the way from Germany just for him.” When his son said he wanted his father to come, Uris gently explained “that a writer had to stay on the job always.”39
While they were waiting, the news broke that Britain and France had issued an ultimatum that they be allowed to occupy the canal and mediate between Israel and Egypt. Betty, who had been so courageous, broke down, asking to be taken home. The thought that the fighting might end, added to her fear of being separated from Uris, convinced her to postpone their departure. Uris said no, the danger was still too high. At two in the morning—after they had been at the airport seven hours—there was a report of the planes approaching, and by three the mammoth aircraft had landed. When he saw the crew of “cocky clean cut American lads emerge…. I knew at that moment [that] my taxes … were well spent and my wife and kids were safe.”40 They moved through customs, fed the children Dramamine, and said a scared and heartbroken good-bye. At four he walked with them to the giant Globemasters, flying boxcars, and the long ramp that led into its cavernous cabin. Embassy personnel in a panic raced ahead of them. But everyone got on swiftly in the rush to get airborne before daylight and possible attack from the Egyptian air force.
As others boarded, they handed Uris their loose change, but in the haste, a woman in the crowd slipped and broke her leg, a memory that remained with young Mark.41 Uris ran into the plane and kissed them all good-bye, and then with a friend, Bob Zion, stood on the runway and watched the belly close and “gobble up our families.”42 The plane roared down the runway into the stars. “Soon it was silent.” He then slipped his hand into his pocket and felt a piece of paper: the list of things Betty had left for him to do. He smiled when he read the first item: “Cancel my appointment with Boris the hairdresser.”
On 4 November, he received a telegram: “ARMY TRANSFER ROME BEAUTIFUL WAIT INSTRUCTIONS UNTIL WEDNESDAY CARE AMERICAN EMBASSY LOVE/BETTY.”43 The planes had flown first to Athens and then on to Rome, where the family was safe.
Uris then began what he would call the shortest career of any war journalist, filing three dispatches, the first being a dramatic account of his family’s departure. His second details a trip to the border settlement of Nahal Oz, which straddled the Gaza Strip, to report on the murder of a young farmer-soldier. Uris attended the funeral and witnessed the determination of the settlement to continue: “There were no tears on that sun baked mound, no hatred … everyone knew his job and repeated a silent vow never to quit.” Moshe Dayan, the Israeli chief of staff, had come for a wedding, but now he spoke a eulogy that reinforced the courage of such settlements.44
In his third “battle report,” Uris summarized a trip into the Sinai, but before he could get anywhere to cover a story, the fighting ended. “Even in these days of souped up warfare, the Israeli cyclone must have set some sort of record,” he writes in his dispatch.45 Unable to get his family back into Israel because of an American “blockade” and unable to earn any money by selling a series of stories about the Sinai campaign to the Hearst chain, Uris decided to pack up. Reluctantly, he left Israel on 29 November on KLM flight 286 from Tel Aviv to Rome with five pieces of luggage, including Duffy (the dog), but not before issuing a public statement on his departure. In a short letter of gratitude, he wrote: “I return to America with but only one thought. To write a book worthy of our people.”46 His reunion at the Hotel Regina Carlton with Betty, who was under the weather from the ordeal, and the children was joyous.
Back in America, Uris understood the difficult job that awaited him, which he described as “the decision of what to use and what to omit, and how to use the facts fictionally.” The goal remained not to tell the story of Israel for a partisan audience “but for the average American who shares a tremendous moral heritage with the Jews of Israel.”47
In New York, Uris spent time with his East Coast agent, Willis Wing, and his publisher. He thought Random House would publish the book, and a tentative contract was drawn up, but he realized that it did not provide what he believed would be enough money for him to devote himself exclusively to the project. He and Wing decided to explore other possibilities, and they went to Doubleday, where years later Uris’s editor Ken McCormick recalled the scene and Uris’s enthusiasm: “I’ll never forget the time you came in to talk to Brad and myself about EXODUS. You paced up and down the office and before you were through, the room was full of that novel.”48
With Doubleday, Uris and Wing shortly negotiated a three-book contract dated 25 February 1957. The first work was to be an untitled novel on Israel; the second, an untitled novel on boxing (likely based on his unproduced 1954 screenplay “Ringside”); the third would be an unspecified novel (which would become Mila 18). Uris received a lucrative advance of $25,000, including $7,500 on signing, making it possible for him to devote the coming year to writing what would become Exodus. Uris and the family returned to 5174 Woodley Avenue in Encino, where he would begin work in earnest.
The actual writing of Exodus was a labor and not always of love. Some weeks it moved swiftly, others slowly. Uris admitted that it was often hard to sleep after spending “eight or ten hours describing Auschwitz or Treblinka.”49 He was also ironing out minor contract details with Doubleday; a formal announcement was to be made in ten days. He and Betty were also thinking about moving, partly because of freeway construction near their home: something more rural with, perhaps, a pool and tennis court he told his father.50 He also mentioned the changing title of his book: originally “The Big Dream,” it became “The Land is Mine,” then “Awake in Glory,” and then “Exodus.” Another alternative was “Beyond the Jordan,” but Uris objected to it. Exodus was picked and dropped fifteen times before it became the final choice.51 He also reported that his former mentor, Howard Cady, has just taken over at Putnam and that Ted Purdy, his former editor, has become president of Cowan-McCann.
In the midst of writing the work, Uris offered opinions about his contemporaries, dismissing James Jones and vilifying Norman Mailer, especially for The Deer Park. Both writers, he felt, should be forgotten because their work was driven by “hatred and confusion and distrust of human beings.”52 Herman Wouk was overrated but not Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Fitzgerald. Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill were also high on his list.53 He admired John Hersey, claiming that The Wall, about the Warsaw Ghetto, is “the finest novel I ever read.” It’s hard to believe, he continues, that this former anti-Semite could write so sympathetically about the Jews: unquestionably, “he is our most underrated novelist.”54 Social conditions motivate all the big books of literature, according to Uris. They are the history of the times and deal with injustice. The problem was how to channel the vast, sprawling material of the past into a work of fiction.
In March, he reported on his progress to his father, saying he had completed about one-quarter of the manuscript.55 But length and structure were creating problems. The book was moving slowly, although the stumbling block of the title was out of the way. He also reminded Doubleday that Israel’s tenth anniversary was coming: “It’s a great target. Otherwise, I’ll be happy to have Moshe Dayan stage another war for us on pub date.”56 Just before sending the first part of the novel to them, 350 typed pages, he asked for criticism, but no major discussions until “the entire work is finished. I am afraid of becoming derailed by going back.”57
While sharing his progress with his father, he assured him that he shouldn’t worry about Doubleday cutting up the manuscript: “I’m a pretty mean man inside a story conference and usually get my own way.”58 However, he would later recount how he had to cut down his nearly one million words to a quarter of a million. His productivity also increased after he bought his first electric typewriter.
Uris originally conceived of the novel as comprising five short novels, each named after a book in the Bible and tied together by the common subject. Flashbacks to 1890 would balance the main story set between 1946 and 1949. To his editor, he explained that he would rather send in each book of the novel as he completed it, asking that Doubleday save its criticisms until he is done; that way he wouldn’t be distracted from the whole.59 He did admit, however, that the introduction of journalist Mark Parker at the beginning was a flaw. He did nothing with him except forget him at the end of the novel. He was used, he admitted, “as a deception to lure the non-Jewish reader into the book.”60
In the midst of his writing, Uris worked for eight weeks on The Big Country for Gregory Peck and Billy Wyler. A recommendation from Hal Wallis in May 1957, after Peck and Wyler had a private screening of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in advance of its general release, made them want Uris. Peck and Wyler needed revisions for the script of The Big Country, which had been drafted by Jessamyn West, who had also written the novel that was the basis for Wyler’s previous hit, Friendly Persuasion. They offered Uris $1,000 a week; he turned them down because he was in the middle of working on Exodus. The British producer of The Angry Hills also contacted him, offering $25,000 for six weeks’ work on the screenplay of that novel and making this unintentionally comic remark: “We have to get Uris because no one on earth knows Greece like he does”!61
On 8 May 1957, Uris accepted a revised offer from Peck and Wyler offer. At $2,000 a week, the money was too good to refuse. He would also receive a percentage of the gross, only the second time a writer had been granted that concession (the first was James Jones with From Here to Eternity). Eight weeks’ work on The Big Country would also be a rest from Israel, which had occupied him since late 1955.62 He saw Gunfight at a press showing and thought it looked better the second time. Its general release a week or so later brought strong reviews; his editors at this time also loved the portions of Exodus they saw, and Oscar Dystel, the president of Bantam Books, told Uris he had ordered another 100,000 copies of Battle Cry on the anticipated interest in Exodus.
Peck and Wyler, however, soon proved to be difficult. Peck was nice, he wrote, but a worrier; Wyler was “a real tough one…. I’m [also] a hard man to work for but the box office figures on Battle Cry and OK Corral keep him [Wyler] listening. Boy! Do we battle.”63 By June, things were falling apart: disagreements with the script plus personality clashes meant trouble. The connection would end when the contract is up, he noted, but “I made a lot of money and didn’t waste much time and did get a rest from Exodus.”64 Within a month, he was liberated from Peck and Wyler.65 The film project had no sooner ended than Raymond Stross, the British producer of The Angry Hills, arrived. He wanted Uris to do the screenplay: it was difficult to land a star without a script, and impossible to get a director without a star. Even though he had financing, Uris put him off.
The future looked bright. Not only did the family plan to move—“I’m not tied to a studio and have no reason for not finding a more suitable … out of the way … peaceful place”—but his agent, Malcolm Stuart, and business manager, Herb Schlosberg, also hoped that after Exodus, he wouldn’t have to take any more outside assignments. Instead, “I’ll stay at home and do my own screenplays on my own time and after they’re finished, I’ll make my deals with the studios. I’m afraid I’ll always have personality clashes otherwise. I can’t stand idiocy.”66 The future for Uris at this stage seemed to be in film rather than fiction, but the immense success of Exodus would sway him to continue with his special formula for turning out best sellers: Jewish history edged with romance and buttressed with fact. While all this was going on, he and Betty took their first weekly Hebrew lesson. He hoped to be able to speak a little Hebrew when he returned to Israel in about six months.
Doubleday pressured him to get on with the novel and suggested a firm deadline. He resisted. In his letter of response, Uris tells Doubleday he will not “cool off” (that is, lose interest) while writing the novel, because he began planning the book “before I wrote Battle Cry”—an exaggeration.67 He then explains in almost cinematic terms why he starts the story in the middle and on Cyprus: to get the action going with his major characters already in a drama. The remainder of the letter outlines the novel in detail and includes this assurance: “There won’t be a dull or slow page in the whole works.” He adds that his time away from the book has recharged his batteries: “Eighteen months solid concentration along with the misadventures of the Uris family had me at a low ebb.” What he does not mention is that work on the Big Country screenplay spilled over into his construction of scene and character in his novel.
His father, however, continued to be an irritant, causing Uris to write several strong replies, one containing an important statement about the purpose and style of the book: “This book is not written for a few people who indulge in high level thought planes but for the masses to understand. The intricacies of Judaism and Israel MUST be simplified for the average reader.”68 He had earlier clarified his intention: “My job is to simplify all the complex dealings and fit it in with the characters I have created. This is the most difficult type of novel to write.”69
Uris circulated the finished manuscript in the spring of 1958 to allow several interested parties to comment on it. One of the most important responses came from Moshe Pearlman, writing from the prime minister of Israel’s office.70 Pearl-man had read the typescript copy sent to Uris’s uncle for possible publication in Israel, as had Ilan Hartuv.
Pearlman focused on details: change the medal a hero receives from the Victoria Cross to the Military Cross—the former was too elite an honor and would constantly call attention to the hero. Clarify that Eichmann was not a Jew, although he did visit Palestine in 1937 to discuss large-scale Jewish immigration. The most important suggestion had to do with the term “Palmach rather than Hagana in the first part of the novel.” According to Pearlman, many readers would have heard about Haganah but not Palmach. To repeat the term would be to suggest that “Palmach was a dissident organization rather like Etzel. Palmachniks were members of Hagana and the Palmach was an integral unit of Hagana … Don’t you think it might be a good idea to substitute a few ‘Haganas’ for a few ‘Palmachs’ in the first part of the book?” Uris did not comment.
Two months before the publication of Exodus, Uris’s name resurfaced in the press. The New York Times crossword puzzle of 8 July 1958 asked, “Author of Battle Cry?” “Uris,” of course, was the answer. The appearance was not coincidental. This was one of several prepublication steps taken to increase publicity for his new novel and a sign of his growing presence in popular culture.71
On 4 August, Doubleday announced in Publishers Weekly that “a major motion picture production of EXODUS is planned by Otto Preminger.” The novel would appear the following month and become the third film to be made from his fiction.
Published on 23 September 1958, the book had a distinctive blue cover with “EXODUS” in type that evoked Hebrew lettering. A freedom fighter stretched the complete length of the book jacket, his rifle barrel casually pointing upward to the author’s name. Maps are used for the endpapers and to introduce each of the five books of the novel (an intentional parallel with the five books of Moses that make up the Torah). A biblical quotation accompanies each of the maps that introduce an individual section. Additionally, a map of the Middle East emphasizing the minuscule region of Israel appears inside the front cover. The rear map is a close-up of the country, the verso the northern part of the land, the recto the southern. Uris clearly felt the need to situate the reader geographically throughout his 626 pages.
Opposite the title page Uris lists his two screenplays as well as the titles of his two previous novels, in an attempt to draw as much attention to his film writing as to his fiction. There is also a statement on the fictional elements of the novel. It notes that “many of the scenes were created around historical incidents for the purpose of fiction” and that all the characters, except public figures “such as Churchill, Truman, Pearson,” are fictitious. In the 1959 paperback, a statement by Uris preceding the title page reiterates his commitment to the Jew as fighter and hero and ends with yet another movie reference: after criticizing those who show the Jew as self-pitying or as riding “the psychoanalysis coach,” he says such attitudes “have been left where they rightfully belong, on the cutting-room floor.”
The back jacket of Exodus contains an iconic image: Uris standing in army fatigues in the desert, alongside a military jeep with his hand on a MG 34 machine gun that is pointing skyward. The caption reads: “With a patrol in the Negev Desert.” “This appears romantic,” he said of the photo, “but the fact is it was 127 degrees in the shade and if I were not holding on, I would have collapsed.”72 Nevertheless, Uris felt this was the most dramatic adventure of his entire stay in Israel and one that he repeatedly mentioned as demonstrating macho prowess and cowboy heroics. He dedicates the book to his three children and his wife, Betty. The hardcover edition cost $4.50.
Sales were initially slow: a modest but respectable 32,000 copies were sold within the first five weeks, despite moderately strong reviews. By the end of January 1959, however, the number had more than tripled. According to Publishers Weekly, the number of copies sold grew to 94,000, and afterward showed rapid growth. By the end of February, it was selling approximately 2,500 copies a day. On 30 March, Doubleday reported 165,000 copies sold, although Publishers Weekly added 10,000 copies to that figure. It became number one on the New York Times best-seller list on 17 May 1959, some nine months after it first appeared. By 1 June 1959, 261,891 copies had been sold, and by late September, a year after it first appeared, nearly 390,000 copies had been purchased. Bantam prepared to release the paperback (priced at seventy-five cents) in October, increasing its print run from an initial 1.5 million to 2.9 million because of demand from outlets that had never before sold books. According to Publishers Weekly, by 13 November 1959, sales registered 399,384 for the hardback and 1,675,000 for the paperback.
And soon Uris was offering commentary on his novel. In one article, “He Went for Broke,” Uris says he followed George Bernard Shaw’s advice: “Begin at the end.” “I had a deep feeling about telling a story of Israel,” he explained, “I had ideas about it but before I started to write anything I figured out my climax and then made all preceding material support it directly.”73 This was a simplification; his actual method was to review his research, double-check details, construct a plot, and then write, working long hours daily. The experience of writing regularly for a movie studio came in handy.
While hardcover sales of Exodus were going strong, Uris went public with his motives for writing the novel and set his fiction against those of his contemporaries, expressing impatience with introspective Jewish writing. In a New York Post interview, he challenged those Jewish American writers who wrote confessionally. They were apologists: “They spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born. This isn’t art or literature. It’s psychiatry…. Their work is obnoxious and makes me sick to my stomach.” He had a different motive for writing Exodus: “I was just sick of apologizing—or feeling that it was necessary to apologize…. We Jews are not what we have been portrayed to be. In truth, we have been fighters.74 To remake the image of the Jew and Judaism was his goal.
Uris treated history liberally, taking liberties with events, facts, time lines, and character; Exodus aimed at impact rather than strict accuracy. The novel opens dramatically with a date, “November 1946,” followed by a quotation from Othello. Mark Parker, a journalist, arrives on Cyprus to meet his friend Kitty Fremont, a widowed American. The story quickly shift’s to Jewish refugees held in British camps on the island, after flashbacks about the lives of Kitty and Mark. A second reunion opens Chapter 2, that of David Ben Ami and, swimming out of the sea, Ari Ben Canaan (EX, 13). The adventure and intersection of these characters is about to begin, set against the menace of British control, imprisonment, and abuse of refugees.
Uris moves the narrative swiftly forward and backward. The refugees held in Caraolos, Cyprus, in British detention camps become the focal point of the first book of the novel. These forces intersect as Uris jump-cuts his story line to introduce the Greek Cypriot who will help Ben Canaan secure a ship to illegally transport children to Palestine. Uris will use intercutting throughout the novel: later, he shifts from David Ben Ami taking Kitty to Mea Shearim in Jerusalem during Sabbath preparations to, on the next page, Ari Ben Canaan getting into a taxi, being blindfolded, and then being driven to a secret location to meet his uncle Akiva, the head of the Maccabees (EX, 343–344).
Lengthy flashbacks supplement the proposed escape of the children on the ship. The first is of Karen, the object of Kitty’s unacknowledged affection, since she lost a child similar in looks, and is dated Cologne, Germany, 1938. For forty pages, Uris recounts her life, telling the story of German Jews trapped in the country and how some were able to send a single child out to safe haven in Denmark. A second flashback tells the story of Dov Landau, beginning in Warsaw in 1939. It is the story of Dov and his role in the ghetto uprising of January 1943. He miraculously survives, only to be sent to Auschwitz at age thirteen, allowing Uris to write chillingly about the camps. Dov’s skill as a forger saves his life.
Book 1 ends with the desperate, guilt-ridden British undersecretary in the Foreign Office cabling Cyprus to let the ship the Exodus go. Book 2 describes the arrival of the Exodus in Palestine, followed by a lengthy flashback about Ari Ben Canaan’s family and their origins. It starts in Russia in 1884, permitting Uris to outline life in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. The writing becomes palpitant: “As Russia came to power, the flaming sword of Islam came up from the south” (EX, 204).
Uris condenses much political history of both Russia and the Middle East, from Turkish rule to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the organization of the Haganah, the army of self-defense, the aggressive Irgun, and the increasing indifference of the British concerning the fate of the Jews. Ari Ben Canaan places an increasingly vital role as a Haganah commander but suffers the tragic murder of his early love, Dafna (EX, 292–293). The loss explains his stony silence and unemotional behavior when we meet him at the opening of the novel. He turns to work for Aliyah Bet, the illegal immigration of Jews into the country. This long flashback ends only with the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel on 22 July 1946 (EX, 317).
The lives of the new arrivals and the slow romance between Kitty and Ari take up most of Book 3. Violence defines the action, however, with the Maccabees (in actuality the Irgun) in conflict with the Haganah. Two stories soon merge, however, with the settling of Gan Dafna (the Garden of Dafna), the children’s settlement where Dov and Karen live, and the continual battle with the British and now the Arabs.
Kitty meets Harriet Saltzman, the elderly director of the Youth Aliyah program, who offers this explanation of an Israeli’s intensity and purpose: “A person wakes up every morning in doubt and tension—not knowing if all he has slaved for will be taken from him. Their country is with them twenty-four hours a day. It is the focal point of their lives” (EX, 341). The statement is key to understanding the ethos of the novel and Kitty’s grasp of Israel.
As Uris shift’s to the late spring of 1947 and the United Nations vote on a Palestine mandate, the novel take on an even broader scope. There are personal and political distractions, including Ari’s finally admitting his longing for Kitty, as well as British reprisals for the murder of the vindictive Major Caldwell. The bombing of the Zion Settlement Building and the attempt on the Yishuv Central building unites the Haganah (with its strike arm, the Palmach) and the Maccabees. Battles take place, including a skillfully planned escape of Dov and Akiva, a Maccabee leader, from the supposedly impregnable Acre prison. And before the end of Book 3, Kitty realizes that she indeed belongs in Palestine and at Gan Dafna.
Uris next takes up the UN vote, concentrating on the international drama of the vote for partition by offering a day-by-day account of the politicking. The next major scene—and Uris largely structures the book from one major scene to another—is the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, re-creating Kol Yisrael’s (the Voice of Israel) radio account of the declaration, allowing him to present reaction from around the country and the world (EX, 539–541). But in a dramatic, foreboding tone, he notes that while the crowds danced the hora in the streets of Tel Aviv, Egyptian bombers took off to bomb the city and Arab armies crossed the borders. He again divides his story by regions, as if a camera were panning across the country and swooping in for close-ups before moving on to the next scene, in order to create a sense of simultaneity.
He begins the final book with rescue flights to neighboring countries to retrieve Jews, focusing on a group of Yemenites rescued in Aden. Then, a sudden leap to 1956 and Nassar’s blockade of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran, while fedayeen marauder gangs burn fields and attack settlements. Karen places herself in jeopardy by going to live at a new frontier settlement, and when Kitty visits her, she explains that she must stay and fight: “We have outlived everyone who has tried to destroy us. Can’t you see it, Kitty? … Israel [is] the bridge between darkness and light” (EX, 614–615). The final chapter occurs on the eve of the first seder of Passover. The principals, except Karen, are there, but all is overturned when Ari brings news of her murder. This devastates all, and Ari finally breaks down in Kitty’s arms, declaring his love and need for her, while Dov, Karen’s lover, rededicates himself to fight for Israel. The novel ends with Dov beginning to read from the Haggadah, the story of the Jews’ escape from Egypt.
Uris changes facts to suit the novel and allows story to control history. He justifies this because his work is fiction not history; he strives for effect rather than accuracy. Character, drama, action, and suspense control events, allowing for the adjustment of fact. Events find new placement, documents become rewritten, and characters take on an air of unreality. Sabras (native-born Israelis) hide their emotions, to the chagrin of Israeli readers, while he inverts the arrogance, recklessness, overconfidence, and stubbornness of the people to represent strengths, not weaknesses.75
Readers loved it, as the 24 June 1959 best-seller list in the Los Angeles Times confirmed: Exodus was number one, followed by Doctor Zhivago, The Ugly American, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Dear and Glorious Physician, and Lolita. When the paperback appeared, marketing went into high gear, creating the fastest-selling work ever published by Bantam. New mass-marketing campaigns were undertaken to get the title out, although the public was skeptical that the paperback was complete. Even after almost 3.5 million copies were in print, Bantam received letters from readers saying that “many do not believe that this small book can actually contain all the material in the original edition.” This prompted Bantam to include a “Publisher’s Note,” which appeared at the end of Uris’s introductory statement and assured readers that “all Bantam editions of EXODUS … are complete and unabridged—the original book, word for word.”
Included in Bantam’s promotion were twenty-one-inch-high freestanding cutout figures of a freedom fighter and a sabra woman. The publisher distributed 2,500 of these “stands,” which carried the tagline “Today’s bestselling novel of Heroism and Desire.” Bantam also sponsored an Exodus window-display contest, similar to one that had occurred for Battle Cry. Large truck banners depicted the cover along with the announcement “Now in Paperback, The bestselling novel.” Additionally, all standard Bantam titles published in September, October, and November 1959 had an Exodus ad on their back covers: this amounted to more than six million notices on forty different titles, including Luke Short’s Saddle by Starlight, Dorothy Worley’s Dr. Jon’s Decision, and the reprint of Battle Cry.76
Reviews of the novel certainly helped. Or rather, some reviews. The Saturday Review of Literature praised the work, as did the New York Times Book Review, the critic calling Exodus a “passionate summary of the inhuman treatment of the Jewish people in Europe … and of the triumphant founding of the new Israel.”77 History was both its advantage and disadvantage: “Unlike most historical novels in which the events of a period merely provide décor, Exodus offers history as its hero,” but the characters are something of an intrusion. According to another reviewer: “It’s a story that calls for a simple minded rhetoric of an unmodulated mind. For Jewish readers it offers the glorification of courage in Jews. It’s David and Goliath or Shane turning on his tormentors and winning.”78 In essence, the novel succeeds as portable, romanticized history.
Others were not so laudatory. “The best way I can describe Exodus is to say it is the Three Musketeers of the Israeli wars. It is a grand mixture of adventure and truth,” Herman Wouk pronounced, with more charity than enthusiasm. The San Francisco Examiner referred to it as a “rambling compilation of past and present history [with] alternately good and bad writing,” while the Nation cited its typecast characters and adolescent eroticism. The reviewer essentially read the book as a great adventure that taught some history and presented Israel and its heroes as Americans and Jews, which is how Americans would like to imagine them.79
Vigorous response to the book continued throughout the year; one of the most vocal critics was Menachem Begin, who spoke at Carnegie Hall on 20 November 1960. The poster advertising the event read: “The most authorized person in the world to tell the truth of EXODUS / the Israeli Leader / Menachem Begin / Ex commander-in-chief of the Irgun (the Jewish Underground Organization) / on / EXODUS—FACTS AND FICTION / at / CARNEGIE HALL / SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, AT 8:30 PM.”80 “Fact—Greater than Fiction” was the way one paper summarized the talk.81 Begin, who was the head of the Freedom (Herut) Party in Israel and the supposed inspiration for Akiva in Exodus, criticized Uris for failing to mention the Irgun directly in the novel. Before a jam-packed New York crowd, he also declared that he was not Akiva and objected to the irrational and psychologically disturbed portrayal of the Maccabees. Yet he defended the actions of the Irgun, claiming that the Palestinian problem had come to the attention of the UN because of their actions. Begin also recounted the Irgun attack on Acre, on 4 May 1947, and said that the UN had not acted out of the blue, which is the impression given in Exodus. The Irgun operation against Goldschmidt House in Jerusalem in March 1947 was an important event that had initiated a debate in the British House of Commons, resulting in a British outcry for a UN special session on the Palestine question.82
The identification of errors and corrections in the novel began to appear in the press, including criticism of Uris’s demonizing of the Arabs. Various reviewers documented that the Arabs in Palestine at the time of the novel’s setting were not at all like the stereotypes Uris portrayed, barbaric, unclean, cowardly, and ignorant.83
Philip Roth challenged the picture of the Jew as fighter, pointing out that to take pride in such behavior was nothing to be proud of. For Roth, Uris corrupted the morality and integrity of Judaism by promoting the violence necessary for its survival. Robert Alter noted how a “double sentimental myth” had developed: the Jew in this type of fiction is an “imaginary creature embodying both what Americans would like to think about Jews and what American Jewish intellectuals would like to think about themselves.”84 Uris’s overdetermined milieu prevented his characters from claiming their own independence.
One of the strongest criticisms came from an Arab source: a thirty-four-page pamphlet by Aziz S. Sahwell. Countering what he saw as propaganda with fact, the author challenged the accuracy of the work and the treatment of Arabs. Uris’s three goals, says the author, were “to justify the violent establishment of a Jewish state on Arab soil, to glorify Israel’s military ‘valor’ in accomplishing its unlawful purpose and to slander and discredit all Arab people.”85 The critic comments on each book of the novel, pointing out what he claims to be distortions. Uris did not respond, although he kept a copy of the document in his archive.
There was more generous praise, however, from critics who assessed the book’s importance to the Zionist movement in America and its role in maintaining public memory of the Holocaust. Uris anticipated a “virtual tidal wave of American anti-Zionist sentiment” but decided to acknowledge it through his American protagonist, Kitty, permitting her to remain skeptical, distant, and unsympathetic toward the plight of the Jews.86 Only through the heroism of Ari and young, displaced Karen, who was Jewish but had been reared by Danish Christians during the Second World War, does Kitty reluctantly come to accept the moral right of the Jews to reclaim and defend their land. Through his heroic sabras, Uris established a definite connection and feeling of responsibility for Israel among American Jews, who suddenly wanted to become Zionists. But Israelis were, themselves, critical. No group of Jews anywhere was as perfect as those shown in the book, one Israeli said. “We thought we had about convinced the world we were just normal people until Exodus came along,” said another.87 Readers worldwide, of course, disagreed.
What reviewers or commentators could not deny was the impact of the book on the cultural consciousness of Americans. It is difficult to recall the indifference or discomfort America and American Jews had toward Israel at the time. The United States had voted for partition, but then withdrew its support of the country, preferring to take a neutral position. American Jews, while sympathetic to the plight of the young country and in a state of disbelief that Israel had been able to hold off Arab armies in the war of independence, were still hesitant to support the country. Zionism seemed ideologically one-sided, and Zionists seemed aggressive, strident, and threatening to Jewish American assimilation. American Jews were also upset or confused by the Suez crisis of 1956, even though it led to the opening of the Straits of Tiran.
Exodus changed all that. In Uris’s presentation of heroic figures who could not only repulse but conqueror an enemy, a new identity for Israel emerged. Israel, linked to Holocaust survival, now meant triumph, with Zionism the key. “Tough Jews” suddenly became admired, although they were not always noble, as some critics pointed out.88 But the impact of Exodus on the psyche of Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike, was incalculable. Not only did travel and contributions to Israel increase, but the perception of the country, and by extension the perception of Jews, changed. They were no longer victims but heroes. The sheer number of copies sold meant that many experienced Jewish history and heroism dramatically and romantically. Jewish activism made Israelis, and by extension all Jews, admirable, their willingness to fight and determination to win overpowering, even ennobling. The impact on Soviet Jewry a decade later was similarly intense. Such responses transcended quibbles about literary failings. The novel was a success for other reasons, culturally reinscribing a gallant, daring view of Jewish history and identity. In a 2001 critique of American policy toward the Middle East, the critic Edward Said commented that “the main narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus.”89
Popular culture soon reconstructed public memory as the value of the Holocaust and Zionism altered from despair to triumph. Exodus foregrounded these topics for Americans, not just Jews, partly as a result of Uris’s literary strategy not to include an American Jew in the story. It was also the result of showing, in the tradition of the western, the triumph of law over crime, morality over immorality, and the ability to establish and maintain a homeland. America approved. Exodus showed that the Holocaust and Jewish identity, even in the Diaspora, were inextricably linked.
Uris pairs the Jewish catastrophe of the Holocaust with the Jewish triumph of Israel. They became the two pillars of Jewish American identity: “out of the ashes of Auschwitz, the birth of Israel.”90 This became part of the mythic American consciousness Exodus promotes. New Israel replaced old Europe, which the American Jew welcomed, encouraged by the American English dialogue in the book. Ari is both the new Israeli and the American Jew as Uris wanted him to be portrayed, originating as the hero of a western. Myth shaped history. But while Jewish-Gentile differences could be bridged, Jewish-Arab ones could not. Arabs remain violent, uncivilized, and unlawful, making personal relations impossible (Ari will never permit his sister Jordana to marry his friend Taha).
The Americanization of Exodus depicts Israel as the culmination and redemption of the Shoah (Holocaust) while it puts Jews at the center of fantasies of American heroism. The destruction of the old Jew in the Shoah, from one perspective, represented the end of Jewish impotence. The birth of Israel and the virile Israeli showed a new Jew to America, one distinct from the self-conscious, sexually awakened, materially oriented American Jew seen in works like Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, which was published the following year. Bullets, not chopped liver, become the new ammunition.91 Being Jewish now had a cachet, and the success of Exodus reconfirmed for the American reading public the acceptance of Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and other Jewish writers who gained immense popularity in the sixties.
Uris employed the Hollywood tradition of personalizing history and reducing politics to a family romance (brother versus brother, for example, as in the strife between Akiva and Barak ben Canaan). And he was not shy about it. Whether out of egotism, self-confidence, or chutzpah, he believed he could tell the story of the state and the history of its people through fragmented stories of individual lives.
Unlike Bernard Malamud, who defensively said, “I’d rather write about Israel if I knew the country. I don’t, so I leave it to the Israeli writers,” Uris challenged this attitude by educating himself about Judaism, Zionism, and Palestine, and spending eight months researching the people and the land.92
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion summed up best the popular reaction to Exodus. Asked what he thought of the novel, he replied that he usually didn’t read fiction, but he had read Exodus. What did he think of it? Smiling, he answered, “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”93 A newspaper article from the same time reported that members of the United Nations delegation stationed at Government House in Jerusalem regularly received copies of the book for study.94
Ben-Gurion was right: not only did Zionism find greater support in America than before, but suddenly everyone wanted to be Jewish also—or at least visit Israel. National pride increased, as did donations to the Jewish National Fund. Tourism took off. The unprecedented wave of visitors frankly puzzled Israelis, as did the tourists’ expectations that they would be meeting characters from the book.95
The man partly responsible for this reaction was the autocratic, Viennese-born Hollywood producer-director Otto Preminger, who declared, after he read an advance copy of the novel, “I couldn’t put the book down. Immediately I knew I had to make the picture.”96 A United Artists publicity statement went on to describe Preminger as a man of fastidious taste: “Wave a good book or excellent play script in front of him, and he’ll want it for the movies.” His previous successes had included Porgy and Bess (1959), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Moon Is Blue (1953), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
In his autobiography, Preminger recalled the day in the early fall of 1958 at his brother Ingo’s home in Los Angeles when he spied a few boxes filled with a manuscript.97 Curious, Otto asked, and was told, that it was a novel about Israel, the property of MGM. Nevertheless, he began to read it and supposedly couldn’t stop, knowing immediately that he, an Austrian-born Jew who was a success in America, had to make the film. Ingo told him the Uris-MGM contract was for an outright purchase of the rights for $75,000, which included partial payment for Uris’s services. In New York, Preminger went to the president of MGM, Joseph Vogel, telling him he wanted the book. It wasn’t for sale, Vogel said. Preminger then explained that if MGM made it, the Arab countries would likely close all MGM theatres and ban all MGM films. Preminger added that Vogel, a studio president, could not afford an Arab boycott, but as an independent producer, Preminger could. There was still no deal, although mention of the possible boycott at an MGM board meeting raised doubts. A week later, Preminger had the rights—but he still needed money.98
Preminger went next to Arthur Krim of United Artists for funds for production costs, knowing Krim was partial to Israel. Shortly after, he had an initial budget of $1.75 million, exclusive of stars’ salaries. The amount was later raised to $3 million.99 Preminger then began to work on the script with Uris. A publicity photo from this period masks the difficulties between these two uncompromising figures. Uris stands with his arm around Preminger, who is reading a copy of the early script pages. The caption, as supplied by United Artists publicity, reads: “The Script Looks Good. Hollywood producer Otto Preminger (left) reads approvingly first pages of the screenplay by Leon Uris (right) adapted from Uris’ 640 page novel, Exodus which Preminger will film.” The words and image are ironic, given the men’s impending disagreement and subsequent feud.100
At first, Preminger and Uris labored through a third of the script, but “it was hopeless”; Preminger claimed that Uris couldn’t write a screenplay, although Uris’s side of the story emphasizes contrasting approaches.101 Preminger believed that part of the problem was dialogue. Uris made his characters in the script sound as if they were in the novel, not the movie. Dialogue meant to be heard is very different from dialogue meant to be read. They disagreed, and by mid-January 1959, Uris was off the picture (although he received a $20,000 severance payment, on top of the $20,000 he had already been paid).102 There is disagreement about whether Uris ever completed a version of the script. Preminger claimed he did; Uris said he did not and in fact did not write so much as a single word of dialogue for the director. With hindsight, Uris said, “I sensed trouble the moment I met Otto, a man hated by everybody.”103
Never one to overlook a conflict, Uris publicized the break with Preminger, who accused him of being incapable of writing dialogue. Uris, in turn, repeatedly refused to see or comment on the movie. Preminger added that when Uris tells a story, he “is too much of a partisan.” The novel has a “pox against all the enemies of the Jews in it, and that is difficult to defend.”104 Years later, an interviewer asked Uris about problems working with Preminger: “I’ve heard you had trouble with screenplays.” Uris answered: “I don’t have trouble with screenplays. I write very good screenplays. Otto Preminger has trouble reading screenplays.”105
But Uris never forgot an insult, and being fired from the film of his most popular work rankled. Ten years later, when Preminger and Uris turned up at a White House reception given by President Johnson for the prime minister of New Zealand, Preminger went up to Uris to greet him. The writer turned away and refused to speak. The conflict between the two egos continued, exacerbated by Preminger’s view of what he had been able to do for Uris’s novel: “I, as usual, … tried to make the characters, beyond the novel, very real. I tried to get the motivations right.”106 As Uris tells it, Preminger dropped him from Exodus because Preminger was dismissive of the book; the movie took precedence. In turn, Preminger supposedly told Uris, “No matter how bad the book is, I’m going to make a great picture of it.”107
First to replace Uris was Albert Maltz, a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, then living in Mexico. Maltz worked diligently on the script and visited Israel for research. But his draft was excessive: four hundred pages long, more an epic than a film. Needing someone else, Preminger turned to another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, in December 1959. This, too, caused a scandal because of his status. The director was in a bind, however. Actors had been signed, and shooting was to begin in April, but a “shootable” script was still missing. Uris’s draft was too stiff, full of unusable dialogue, and emphatic about the anti-British, anti-Arab conflicts, which Preminger wanted to downplay. Maltz’s script was too long.
Uris’s mistake with the script was that he (and Maltz) tried to adapt the entire novel to the screen. Trumbo realized this would not work: there were simply too many stories in the book. When he met with Preminger, Trumbo asked a crucial question: “Which story did he want to tell?” Preminger answered immediately, “The birth of Israel.”108 Later notes on the script by Trumbo to Preminger confirm that he solved the structural problem with Uris’s novel, which splintered the historical story into three parts (the Exodus ship, the Haganah-Irgun rivalry, and the conflict between Arabs and Jews). Trumbo’s solution was to concentrate throughout the film on the UN vote on partition as the principal interest of all the main characters.109 He also removed references to Jewish claims of a divine right to Palestine.
Objecting to the anti-British and anti-Arab themes in the novel, Preminger had Trumbo show that the Israelis were sympathetic toward the British. “Through a few changes from the book,” he believed his version came closer “to the truth and to the historic facts” while avoiding propaganda: “‘It’s an American picture after all, that tries to tell the story, giving both sides a chance to plead their side.’”110 Uris was, of course, incensed by this alteration.
Other changes from the novel to the screen: concentrating the action into a three-month period (September–November 1947), ending just after the UN vote for partition; making some of the passengers on the Exodus adults; and shifting the theme from nationalistic Zionism to peace and brotherhood. Trumbo also introduced comedy, notably the scene in which Major Caldwell (Peter Lawford) peers into the eyes of Ari (Paul Newman) while declaring he can spot a Jew anywhere, though he fails to recognize Ari as one. The elimination of Kitty’s anti-Semitism, present at the beginning of the novel, and making her husband a photojournalist who was killed in Palestine during a Haganah operation, rather than a marine killed on Guadalcanal, are additional modifications. Ironically, Kitty falls in love with a member of the organization responsible for her husband’s death.
The film also presents a more optimistic view of Arab-Jewish relations. For example, Taha remains a friend of Ari and the Jews, even when pressed to fight. In the novel, he breaks off that friendship when Ari refuses to allow him to marry his sister, Jordana. The film also suggests that ex-Nazis, one of whom appears as a character, incited the Arabs against the Jews. No such cause occurs in the book. Additionally, the novel ends with bittersweet optimism at the Passover seder, which celebrates both the original Exodus and Israelis’ implicit arrival in the promised land, although darkened by the news of Karen’s murder. The film ends with Ari standing over the shared grave of Taha and Karen and offering qualified hope that Jews and Arabs will some day live together; the Palmach then pile into trucks with the air of deputies charging off to capture a gang of bandits in a western, eager to defend the country from further attacks.
Exodus was the first major American film shot entirely on location in Israel, with Preminger converting part of Galilee into a huge movie set. The shooting schedule ran from 24 March to 1 June 1960 in Israel and then from 5 June to 3 July 1960 in Cyprus. Preminger visited the country from London (his base was the Dorchester Hotel) several times in 1959 to scout locations, network with politicians, and finalize details. Publicity accompanied each of his trips. Moshe Dayan attended a dinner party for Preminger at Rehovot during one these visits. On these trips, Preminger held court at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv, and after six months of preparation, he was ready to bring the technical crew, generators, costumes, extras, and actors to Israel. The Hotel Zion in Haifa became the production company’s headquarters.
Filming in Israel presented challenges, logistically and cinematographically. One reporter joked that “to film it [the movie], the producer took a bigger army to Israel than the Israelis used to fight the Arabs.”111 He employed a cast of five hundred and dozens of crew members; brought technicians from London, Rome, and the United States; hired two destroyers; shifted fifteen thousand props around the desert; and had the courage left to call his twenty thousand extras “the best behaved crowd I have ever seen.”112 But Preminger warred with his stars. Paul Newman, who enjoyed discussing character motivation with his directors, found that Preminger wanted his actors to do only what they were told. Newman arrived in Israel with five pages of notes for Preminger. The director scanned them, admitted they were interesting, but announced, “If you were directing the picture, you would use them…. As I am directing the picture, I shan’t use them.”113 Preminger ruled decisively: when United Artists later begged him to cut the lengthy, 212-minute film, he adamantly refused.
He could even move ships. When a modern ocean liner, the SS Jerusalem, regally sailed into Haifa and into the frame of his complicated setup for the arrival of Jewish refugees on the Exodus, Preminger immediately had his executive assistant call the Israeli minister of trade and industry to get the ship out of the way. The minister was on the phone in minutes, listening to Preminger outline the cost of resetting the scene and shutting down production for a day. Money would be lost. A compromise was reached on the spot: the passengers would disembark, but the ship would leave immediately, returning hours later to offload luggage—but only after Preminger had finished his shooting.114
There were other problems: 250 extras had been hired to play escaping prisoners in the Acre prison-break scene, but 253 people were counted as fleeing. Three inmates from a nearby mental ward had joined the “escapees.”
Preminger hired as adviser to the film Major-General Francis Rome, who had commanded British troops in the Haifa area at the time of the 1947 attack on the Acre prison. The Israelis loaned him Colonel Gershon Rivlin, one of the former leaders of the Haganah. The two got on surprisingly well, swapping stories of “past rivalries.” General Rome advised on matters of the British army in the film, and Colonel Rivlin gave advice on how to blow up British installations and smuggle arms into the country.115
One of the largest challenges was how to get sufficient people into the Russian Compound for the important concluding scene, the announcement of the UN vote on partition. Upward of at least twenty thousand unpaid actors had to be there. The solution? Ilan Hartuv had the answer: hold a lottery (quite popular in Israel at the time) and issue thousands of free tickets. In addition to monetary prizes, there would be six grand prizes announced at the climax of the big scene: six round-trip tickets to the opening of the film in New York. Response to the raffle was astonishing, and some forty thousand people from all over the country appeared. As the raffle results were announced, a tremendous cheer erupted—equal to the excitement that broke out when Preminger announced to the throng that Adolf Eichmann had just been caught and brought to Israel (Ben-Gurion made the public announcement on 23 May 1960).116 Moviegoers assumed, of course, that the crowd was reacting to the news about partition.117
Criticism of the film began the moment casting was announced. In the novel, Ari Ben Canaan is dark and has a large build. Paul Newman was slight and had a fair complexion. And although Ben Canaan is a Middle Eastern Jew, Newman speaks with an American accent in the film. Dov Landau is blond in the novel, making it possible for him to pass from the Warsaw Ghetto into the city. Sal Mineo, who played him in the movie, was dark. Additionally, in the novel Dov only observes the young boys and girls selected for sexual service by the Nazis at Auschwitz; in the film, he reveals he was a participant, during a tension-filled scene in which he proves why he is worthy to become a member of the Maccabees. In the film, he transforms himself from a powerless and degraded victim into a proud fighter.118
Exodus premiered at the Warner Theatre in New York on 15 December 1960, followed by showings in Chicago and Beverly Hills. It was a hit, with sold-out shows throughout January 1961. The New York opening drew Preminger, Adlai Stevenson, Leonard Bernstein, Billy Rose, Paddy Chayefsky, Myrna Loy, and Maria Schell. Reviewing for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther thought the film too long, at three hours thirty-two minutes, and too episodic: as a result, it was not dramatically compelling, the fault of Preminger and Trumbo. They also temporized the presentation of the tensions between the Arabs, Jews, and British. There was more tension between the Haganah and Irgun than between the Jews and the British and the Arabs, he wrote.119 Nonetheless, Exodus was tops at the Christmas box office, beating out Spartacus.
Criticism of the length, however, continued, and many agreed with the comedian Mort Sahl when he stood up at a premiere and announced to the audience and Preminger, “Otto, let my people go.”120 A cartoon bookmark was also symptomatic: two goats are in a field, and one, while eating the film of Exodus, turns to the other and says, “I enjoyed the book better.”121 Nevertheless, reviews of the film were sympathetic, acknowledging the difficulty of transferring Uris’s “corpulent” novel, with its multiple stories, to the screen. Analyses of the film have interpreted it as a model text for the heroic-nationalist genre in Israeli films. The promotion of Zionism as liberation of the land became a myth that influenced Israeli cinema for nearly two decades.122
Exodus quickly set box-office records around the country, and was nominated for three Academy Awards: best supporting actor (Sal Mineo), best color cinematography, and best score, the only award it won. Ernest Gold wrote the music, which Ferrante and Teicher recorded, and the title song became a pop hit. One personal consequence of the film was Sal Mineo’s romantic involvement with Jill Haworth, the fourteen-year-old actor who played Karen, which continued for many months. The movie earned more than $8 million in domestic rentals; in 1962, Preminger sold his interest in the film to the production company for $1 million.123
At thirty-four, Uris had achieved international fame, although he still thought of himself as a screenwriter as much as a novelist.124 But it was his identity as the author of Exodus that stuck over the next decade and beyond. The novel—aided by the film—would continue to record vast sales and affect millions. Sales of Exodus far exceeded expectations as it found a worldwide reading public despite its lack of literary merit.125 Summarizing the paradox is the comment of a Washington Post reviewer concerning another popular novel: “It’s a lousy book. So I stayed up to until 3 a.m. to finish it.”126