Exodus by Leon Uris

First published: 1958

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical

Time of plot: 1946-1948

Locale: Cyprus and Israel

Principal characters

• Ari Ben Canaan, Israeli independence leader
• Barak Ben Canaan, father of Ari
• Akiva, Barak’s brother
• Katherine “Kitty” Freemont, an American nurse
• Dov Landau, a Holocaust survivor and member of the Maccabees
• Karen Hansen Clement, a Holocaust survivor
• Mark Parker, an American journalist
• Bill Fry, a Jewish American sea captain
• Taha, an Arab brought up with Ari

The Story:

It is 1946, and World War II is over. Throughout Europe, Jewish refugees from the Nazi death camps are trying to get to Palestine. The British have blockaded Palestine and interned many of the refugees in camps on Cyprus, where many of them continue to make plans in hopes of reaching Palestine. Ari Ben Canaan works for Mossad Aliyah Bet, the Organization for Illegal Immigration; he has a plan to lead an escape of three hundred Jewish children on a ship renamed Exodus. Ari convinces Kitty Freemont, a slightly anti-Semitic American nurse, and Mark Porter, an American journalist, to help with his plan.

During the war, Kitty’s husband was killed, and her only child died shortly afterward. At first, Kitty is very determined not to help Ari. She tours the refugee camps and meets Karen Clement, a young refugee from Germany who spent the war years hidden as a Christian with a Danish family named Hansen. While in Denmark, she adopted Hansen as her last name, and she has kept it as her middle name. Through her interaction with Karen and especially through hearing the story of Karen’s survival, Kitty learns to love Karen and decides to adopt her. She begins to overcome her anti-Semitism and starts working with Ari, who leads the successful escape. When the children are onboard Exodus, however, the British will not let them sail. The children go on a hunger strike. When the strike fails to convince the British to let them sail, the people onboard Exodus announce that ten volunteers will commit suicide daily until the ship is permitted to leave port. Thanks mainly to articles Mark publishes in American newspapers, world opinion forces the British to allow the ship to sail. Ari and Kitty sail with the children. The people on the ship recall events from their past that exemplify the history of the Middle East and of European Jewry.

In the early twentieth century, Jossi and Yakov Rabinsky walk from Western Russia to Palestine, witnessing and recalling generations of Russian anti-Semitism, including pogroms (organized riots, usually directed against Jews) in which whole Jewish populations are massacred. When they reach Palestine, Jossi changes his name to Barak Ben Canaan. He becomes the father of Ari. Barak works with the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization that later becomes part of the Israeli Defense Forces. Yakov changes his name to Akiva. He helps form the Maccabbees, a group intent on extracting vengeance from the English for all atrocities they have committed. The two brothers become estranged.

Just as Germany begins to persecute the Jews before World War II, the British produce a white paper that ends Jewish migration to Palestine. Even though Palestinian Jewish forces fight for Britain in World War II and many Arab nations side with the Nazis, after the war, the British side with the Arabs in Palestine because of the Arab nations’ oil and refuse to allow Jews to leave Europe and come to Palestine. In response, the Maccabees blow up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British have their headquarters. The Exodus arrives in Palestine on the second day of Hanukkah, a holiday that celebrates, among other things, the Maccabbees’ winning independence from King Antiochus and his successor and the establishment of Judea.

Ari loves a fellow Haganah soldier, Dafna, who is raped and killed by Arabs when she is seventeen. As Ari shows Kitty through Palestine, he finds himself drawn to her, and she is drawn to him. As British rule of Palestine becomes more brutal, the Maccabbees and the Haganah, with whom Ari sides, work together to attack the British. Ari’s Uncle Akiva and Dov Landau, a young survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp whom Ari got into Palestine on the Exodus, work for the Maccabbees. The British capture them and try them in secret. When Ari’s father asks Ari to free the prisoners, Ari leads a successful attack on the prison, but during the escape Akiva is killed and Ari is badly wounded. He goes to a Druse village, where Kitty helps him recover. The Druse are a group of Middle Eastern Muslims, many of whom support Israeli independence. Kitty and Ari fall in love, but Kitty says that she will not endure Ari’s determination to fight for his people first and love her second.

The United Nations votes to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab homelands, but the Arab nations refuse to accept the partitioning, wanting to take the whole of Palestine for themselves. Neither the British nor the United Nations do anything to stop Arab riots and Arab killing of Jews. When the British withdraw from Palestine, they leave the Arabs in control of most of the strategic parts of the land. A war breaks out between Israel and the Arabs, a war that the Israelis eventually win. After the successful War for Israeli Independence, Barak dies and is buried next to Akiva. Karen is killed by the Arabs. Kitty realizes that she loves Ari enough to remain with him even though she knows that, for him, Israel will come first. Immigrants continue to come to Israel from Europe and from Arab nations.

The main surviving characters of the story meet in Jerusalem. They celebrate Passover, a holiday that involves retelling the story of the biblical book of Exodus, which recounts the Jews’ liberation from bondage in Egypt.

Bibliography

Breines, Paul. Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Sees Ari Ben Canaan as a forerunner of other “tough Jews” in American literature.

Cain, Kathleen Shine. Leon Uris: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. A book-length study of Uris. Chapter 5 treats Exodus at length, examining its plot, characters, and themes and ending with a Marxist reading of the book.

Furman, Andrew. Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel, 1928-1995. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Chapter 3, “Embattled Uris: A Look Back at Exodus,” examines Uris’s book at length, looking especially at the controversies involving the book’s use of stereotypes.

Gonshak, Henry.“’Rambowitz’ Versus the ’Schlemiel’ in Leon Uris’s Exodus.” Journal of American Culture 22, no. 1 (1999): 9-16. Compares the figure of the larger-than-life Jewish action hero reminiscent of Jewish versions of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo film character with the weak and cowardly Jewish stereotype of the schlemiel. Gonshak treats his own ambivalence concerning the tough Jew of the sort Uris creates.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Leon Uris, 78, Dies; Wrote Sweeping Novels Like Exodus.” The New York Times, June 25, 2003. An obituary that includes a summary of Uris’s life and works. Reviews the research that went into the writing of Exodus.

Uris, Leon. “Exodus” Revisited. Photography by Dimitrios Harissiadis. New York: Doubleday, 1960. A photographic treatment of Israel based on many of the events and places portrayed in Exodus.

Weissbrod, Rachel. “Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama.” Israel Studies 4 (1999): 129-152. Treats both Uris’s book and the movie based on it as melodramas.