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CHAPTER II

MAKING THE HOLOCAUST

The ‘holocaust’ in the lexical sense is denotative of general

destruction and the horror that it entails. Instead of problematising the

nuances of the above expression, what is attempted in this chapter is an

examination of the precise ways in which it is used from the vantage point

of the Jews as a political platform ever since the second half of the

twentieth century. The etymological considerations with respect to the

‘holocaust’ as elaborated in secondary literature are recapitulated here as a

preface to its application in the polemical and political planes.

The term ‘holocaust,’ translated from the Hebrew word shoah, has

come to occupy a central place in Jewish vocabulary. It is the standard term

used to describe the catastrophe that befell European Jewry during the Nazi

era. However the term shoah was used infrequently until 1946. The word

that was often used by Jews in Palestine and in the Diaspora, both in

Hebrew and in Yiddish, was hurban meaning destruction. Hurban was the

traditional Hebrew term to describe the destruction of the First and Second

Temples and the exile from “Eretz Israel.” Jews extended the concept to

include their sufferings as a result of pogroms in medieval and modern

times, as well as their loss of national independence in ancient times. It was

not until the summer of 1947 that Yad Vashem, an institution established in

Jerusalem in 1946 to commemorate those Jews annihilated by the Nazis,

used the word shoah in the title of a conference dedicated to research into

shoah. For a number of years both hurban and shoah were words used in

public discourse until shoah became the dominant term. This was the result

of a process which reflected the internalization and conceptualization of the

events of the Second World War and their impact on the Jews. It is also

39

stated that the acceptance of the term shoah in the late 1940’s as a standard

term to describe the fate of Europe’s Jews between 1933 and 1945

demonstrated a certain understanding that Jewish suffering during the war

was unprecedented within the continuum of Jewish historical experience

(see Ofer 568-70). Thus shoah or holocaust implies not just death but total

destruction—the racial anti-semitic motivation of the Nazis to annihilate all

Jews. Moreover holocaust suggests not only a brutally imposed death but

an even more brutally imposed life of humiliation, deprivation and

degradation before the time of dying. However, while the holocaust

remains an undeniable fact of the past, opinions regarding the nature and

gravity of the episodes, and the numbers of those who perished in the gas

chambers vary.

James E Young observes that of the centuries of historical

archetypes for suffering, those generated during the period of the holocaust

have overwhelmed all others. Images and figures from the shoah have

displaced their historical precedents. This is attributed partly to the sheer

enormity of events, partly to the great proportion of holocaust survivors in

Israel in the early decades of Israeli state formation, and partly to the

central negative place of the holocaust in Zionist ideology as the ultimate

consequence of Jewish vulnerability in the diaspora (134).

The holocaust and its aftermath has resulted in a volume of literature

so large as to be beyond the reach of mastery. The linguistic sites where the

‘holocaust’ has found its vibrant presence include all the major European

languages, most of the minor ones, and most emphatically, the Jewish

languages—Hebrew and Yiddish. It has also found its way to all the

generic forms of language. Thus the holocaust has been addressed in

novels and short stories, in poems and plays, in expository prose memoirs,

diaries and journals, in philosophical essays, in parables, ballads and songs.

Writers of the holocaust including Elie Wiesel, William Styron and Yaffa

40

Eliach, to name a few, see the holocaust as an exceptional catastrophe of

universal scope, something beyond a political event, a simple war or a

pogrom—as an event that defied words, language, imagination or

knowledge ( see Lewis 159,179,38). Alvin H Rosenfeld observes that the

holocaust has altered our very conception about the human, and cites Elie

Wiesel to reinforce the point: “at Auschwitz, not only man died but also

the idea of man.” Rosenfeld sees holocaust literature as a record of that

dying (5). As Lawrence A Langer notes, “ The uniqueness of the

experience may be arguable, but beyond dispute is the fact that many

writers perceived it as unique and began with the premise that they were

working with raw materials unprecedented in the literature of history and

the history of literature” (The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination xii).

Four of Leon Uris’ novels deal fully or at least in part with Nazism

and the holocaust. These include Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII and

Armageddon. In the novels of Leon Uris the events related to the holocaust

are arranged and presented in such a way that they generate new meanings,

and in the process the holocaust assumes tremendous significance. The

events that comprise the holocaust are here not simply instances of

hardships endured by a small fragment of human society or mere acts of

violence occurring in the context of war. On the other hand they are

represented as vindictive acts forming part of a definite racial project aimed

at wiping out a whole community of innocent people. ‘Holocaust’ thus gets

recognised as the most unique and most indelible event in the history of the

modern period.

Emphasis has been laid on how Leon Uris’ holocaust novels can be

made sense of through a new-historicist reading by examining the various

narrative strategies employed in the treatment of the holocaust. This

endeavour also involves an evaluation of how a modern popular novel

takes on an event of the past like the holocaust for the realization of

41

political programmes in the present. Along with an analysis of authorial

strategy and audience response, the chapter also includes an enquiry into

such aspects as the writer’s vision in relation to Zionism as revealed in the

novels, and the role of the holocaust in shaping the social and political life

of the Jewish community in Israel and elsewhere.

An analysis of the various strategies of narration employed by Leon

Uris in his novels dealing with the holocaust may now be attempted. In the

novels of Leon Uris the holocaust is made to appear as a unique event, an

event without parallel in human history. Typically distinctive features of

the holocaust are highlighted in order to place the event in a category

altogether apart. Uris puts forth several arguments to drive home the

message that the holocaust was uniquely evil, that never before had a state

set out as a matter of intentional principle and actualised policy, to

annihilate physically every man, woman and child belonging to a specific

people. Graphic instances of German sadism figure prominently in Uris’

holocaust fiction. Doing double service it documents the unique

irrationality of the holocaust as well as the fanatical anti-Semitism of its

perpetrators. Uris’ focus here is three-fold: on the relentless sadistic cruelty

of the Nazi conquerors, the helplessness and misery of their Jewish victims

and the dispiriting passivity and acquiescence of the “gentile world.” Nazi

barbarism exhibited openly and with great ostentation is recorded in all its

revolting details, and analyzed as a form of national psychosis that

surpasses in its tyrannical and perverted drive anything previously

experienced.

Among the various objects that epitomise the holocaust as the most

unique and most evil episode in human history, the ghetto is animated as a

conspicuous vehicle. The ghetto is presented as infusing multiple feelings

of seclusion, inferiority, suffering and an inevitable servility for the Jewish

community. Descriptions of the Jewish ghetto in Uris’ Mila 18 and Exodus

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are animated with images of segregation and torture, and appear like an

unbroken chain of horror-inducing experiences. The Warsaw Ghetto is

described as the largest human stockyard the world had ever known and

which housed half a million people. The ghetto is given the feel of a dismal

space with “no place to walk in…nor bench to sit upon, nor nightingale to

hear,” where “there was only misery and beggars, and stone and brick,

without a leaf of grass or the green of a tree” (Mila 235-36).

Among the various descriptions that portray the gruesome stories of

the captives at Warsaw, Uris’ ‘citation’ of Alexander Brandel’s Journal

entry is invested with tremendous authority. It provides an account of the

enormous death rates in the ghetto from typhus and starvation. With no

facilities for funerals, families are shown as being forced to deposit their

corpses on the sidewalk, and “sanitation teams” coming along with hand

push carts shovelling the corpses up and taking them for burial in mass

graves. Other ghastly images include scenes of starved children prowling

near bakeries, driven by hunger, grabbing bread from people and eating it

on the run. Uris notes that often the children were beaten half to death

while cramming the bread into their bellies (Mila 291).

Details of death by starvation are authenticated through reports of a

comprehensive medical study on starvation conducted by the Orphans and

Self-Help doctors in the ghetto under the leadership of Dr Glazer. The

mental and physical changes of those dying of hunger, the patterns of

which are shrinking flesh, gauntness, change in skin colour, weakness,

running sores, depressions, hallucinations, gnarling bones, bloating

stomachs and so on, are enumerated sarcastically by Brandel as a “Jewish

gift to posterity—a detailed account of what it is like to starve to death”

(Mila 311). While relating the story of Dov Landau in Exodus, Uris talks at

length about the situation in the Warsaw ghetto in the winter of 1941. The

author points out that hundreds and thousands starved or froze to death in

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the ghetto. These include “infants too weak to cry,” and old men even “too

weak to pray” (120).

Brandel’s Journal entry, along with providing an insight into the

horrors of ghetto life, also “records” how Nazi propaganda sought to justify

ghettoization as a means to isolate the warmongers and “filthy Jews” from

the Poles, and to “protect” the Jews from the vengeance of the Poles once

the Poles understood that the Jews had brought the German invasion upon

them (292).

Dov’s story is also utilised by Uris with tremendous ingenuity to

make powerful projections about the horrors of the labour barracks of

Auschwitz. The following passage can be seen as an exemplar:

Here the inmates were underfed, worked to living

skeletons, and stacked on shelves for their five hours’ sleep at

night. Disease ran wild. Prisoners were tortured, driven

insane, beaten and degraded and every known atrocity

conceived by man was committed. Here each morning found

dozens of inmates who had hanged themselves by their own

belts or thrown themselves on the quick mercy of the electric

wire. The flogging blocks were in constant use and naked

buttocks were lashed in public at roll calls. Here the penal

colony lived in single black cells and were fed only oversalted

vegetables to induce unquenchable thirst… This was

Auschwitz and this was Dov Landau’s gift of life, Labor

Liberates. (140)

Uris also describes the horrendous situation in the Jadwiga

concentration camp with its fifty labour camps holding up to half a million

slave labourers for work in armament factories, a chemical factory and

many other kinds of war plants. The horrors of Jadwiga are effectively

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summed up through the words of Robert Highsmith, counsel for Adam

Kelno, a Polish doctor who had worked in collaboration with the Nazis at

Jadwiga: “Well, that was what Jadwiga concentration camp was all about.

A mad hell hole in which every semblance of normal human society had

been destroyed” (QB 492).

The extreme brutality of the holocaust is brought out in the graphic

depictions of the Nazi concentration camps with their various instruments

of torture, the pseudo-scientific experimentation camps where sexual

sterilization experiments were performed on helpless Jewish victims, and

the extermination chambers capable of carrying out even ten thousand

executions within a single day.

Armageddon which tells the story of the fateful years of the Four

Power Occupation of Germany through to the Berlin airlift, also throws

light on holocaust atrocities. Using the fictitious city of Rombaden as the

backdrop to the action, Uris acquaints the reader with the horrors of

concentration camps located close to residential communities. The

American team’s reaction on seeing Schwabenwald, permeated with the

overwhelming odour of corpses left to rot, is made to portray effectively

the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp. Uris notes that when the

inspection was done, the team members sat about limp and drained. Terse

comments such as, “How could the human race have come to this?” and

“How in the name of God could they have done this?” serve to highlight

the image of the holocaust as a uniquely evil event—an event without

parallel in human history. Dante Arosa and Bolinski—men who had lived

in the thick of battle—are shown retching while the young sergeant

O’Toole is seen to break down and cry (78). Christopher de Monti’s

perusal of the Combined Jewish Organization’s report on the extermination

centres in Poland evokes a similar response. The full report of Andrei

Androfski and a handful of survivors of Treblinka, Chelmno, and the

45

labour camps, has Christopher de Monti vomiting “until his guts screamed

with pain”(Mila 355). Horst Von Epp, different from the other Nazi

characters in Uris’ fiction, serving as official in charge of Nazi

propaganda, voices similar sentiments in his conversations with the

American journalist Christopher de Monti: “It will take the great

philosophical and psychiatric brains a hundred years to find a standard of

morals to explain this behaviour”(Mila 387).

The Nazi master plan for the extermination of the Jewish population

may be seen as a standard theme in the entire length and breadth of the

novels surveyed in the present study. But Exodus and Mila 18 get the

readers to discern the full fury of the Nazi extermination plan. Exodus

throws light on the “final solution of the Jewish problem” which is

mentioned as the culmination of the combined brainwork of a team

spearheaded by none other than Adolf Eichmann. The reader is given a feel

of the enormity of the Nazi grip over Europe in the author’s statement that

the entire Continent was interlaced with concentration camps and political

prisons, and every occupied country saturated with Gestapo establishments

(133). Uris talks about the various strategies adopted by the Nazis in

perfecting the techniques of genocide. The thoughts and words of the

character SS Colonel Karl Hoess are employed to draw a contrast between

the extermination centres at Treblinka and Auschwitz. According to Hoess,

Treblinka had been poorly designed and the execution procedure carried

out there inefficient, since the Treblinka chambers could hold only three

hundred victims at a time, and the executions were carried out with carbon

monoxide, which he felt was not efficient enough. The other reasons

attributed were that the machinery was always breaking down, and that it

used up valuable petrol. The Birkenau chambers at Auschwitz by contrast

could hold three thousand people at a time and “with utmost efficiency ten

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thousand people a day could be exterminated, depending on weather

conditions”(Exodus 135).

It is significant that the places that figure in the novels as the

specialised persecution centres include both historical and fictitious ones.

Equally significant is the historicity of at least a few cases of the

persecution of the Jews. This crisscrossing of the historical and the

fictitious places and events remains inseparable in the general narrative

mould of Uris to such an extent that the fictitious and the historical derive

strength from each other. This serves to perpetuate the intensity of pain and

loss that the Jews are said to have been subjected to.

Uris gets the image of Nazi atrocities sharply etched in the reader’s

mind in utmost gravity through animated descriptions of the extermination

procedure at Auschwitz, and the gory task of the sonderkommandos. While

the story of Dov Landau is narrated, readers are offered descriptions of

Jewish deportations to the death camps in overloaded cattle and freight

trains, coal cars, and open gondolas. The story goes that the train from

Warsaw carrying Dov Landau, nearly fifty cars long, has one out of every

five persons dead by the time it reaches Auschwitz. Other hundreds were

frozen to the sides of the car unable to move without tearing off the flesh of

arms or legs. At Auschwitz the victims are forced towards a huge station

room under the control of storm troopers bearing whips, truncheons and

pistols. The pathos is heightened through descriptions of weak ones being

ripped to pieces by snarling dogs let loose on them. Uris also gives the

reader an insight into the procedure at the “selection centre.” Seven out of

ten—mostly children and those who were old or appeared to be in bad

condition—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Those who appeared fit

and well were sent to the labour camps, while young women were sent as

“German field whores,” and a few teenage boys “for homosexual activities

with the German officers” (138). Uris also provides plain and live

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descriptions of how the system of deception practised by the Nazis worked

to keep the victims calm to the very end. The main technique of deception

used was that the victims were going to be inspected and given a delousing

shower before being issued new clothing and sent to labour camps. Hair

was cut for delousing and the victims told to remove their eye glasses

before entering the “sanitation shower.” Everyone was issued a bar of soap

and marched naked, three thousand at a time, down long corridors to the

“shower rooms.” Often a last-minute panic would break out as the victims

realized that the “soap” was made of stone and that the shower heads on

the ceiling were fake and that there was no drainage for water. The iron

doors of the “shower room” were bolted after the German storm troopers

clubbed and whipped the reluctant victims in. A can or two of Cyklon B

was dropped into each “shower room” and it was all over in ten or fifteen

minutes (Exodus 136).

In QB VII the author gives elaborate pictures of the gas chambers of

Jadwiga West, where over two million people were put to death. It is stated

that family heirlooms and valuables like gold rings and diamonds brought

by the Jews were systematically looted, gold teeth pulled out from corpses,

and stomachs cut open before the corpses were burnt, to see if they had

swallowed any valuables. Hair shaved off from the victims was used to

stuff mattresses in Germany and to seal submarine periscopes (QB 321).

Details of the extermination procedure conclude with the author’s comment

that often a well-shaped skull would be taken for sale to the German guards

as paper weights. The Jewish death toll at Birkenau alone is accounted to

be around two million.

Uris also touches upon the role of the Jewish sonderkommandos

who were forced to work as clean-up squads, engaged in emptying the gas

chambers and removing the corpses to the crematoriums. The

sonderkommandos waiting in the corridors until the gassing was over,

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stood by until the shrieks of agony and frantic pounding on the iron doors

stopped. Uris provides graphic descriptions of the sonderkommandos

working with ropes and hooks to untangle the hideous tangle of arms and

legs before dragging them out for reshipment to the crematorium. As the

story of Dov Landau is recounted, readers are provided details of the

sonderkommando’s gory task. After the bodies were removed, he had to

enter the chamber and hose it down and get the room ready for the next

batch of victims. Three days at this gory task had taken the young boy to a

stage when he dreaded the instant when the iron chamber door opened, and

he came face to face with the tangle of corpses (Exodus 142).

These descriptions provide ample scope for the author to drive home

the point that the Germans had looked upon the Jews—both dead and

alive—with absolute disdain, and that the sufferings of this diasporic lot

shorn of their self-respect, wealth, identity, and even the basic necessities

for human existence were of the most unique kind.

In QB VII Uris takes on the issue of inmate collaborators in the Nazi

death camps and the capacity for evil in ordinary citizens placed in such

trying circumstances. Here readers placed in the position of onlookers in

the courtroom witness the holocaust drama played out on a stage of

memory and horror, as victims of sexual sterilization experiments offer

detailed testimony regarding painful medical procedures and brutal

treatment at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The author

gains an opportunity to run down the conduct of doctors in the Nazi

concentration camps, who abandoned the traditional guiding norms for the

practice of medicine, and carried out or co-operated with the Nazis, for

medical experiments done forcibly on helpless Jewish victims. Through the

testimonies of holocaust survivors, Uris acquaints the reader with shocking

details of the mass sterilization campaign spearheaded by two characters,

SS doctors Adolph Voss and Otto Flensberg, as well as of other medical

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experiments, whose purpose had nothing to do with a contribution to

medical knowledge that would eventually save or improve life, but were

simply meant for the manipulation and killing of innocent Jews. Through

QB VII Uris takes the reader down through the war years from 1939 to

1945 when Adolph Voss and Otto Flensberg induced Himmler to allow

them to establish an experimental centre in Jadwiga with the use of human

guinea pigs. The experiments included cancer experiments of the cervix,

induction of sterilization through injection of caustic fluid into the fallopian

tube, and other bizarre blood and sputum experiments. Other experiments

meant to find the mental breaking point of victims and the amount of

radiation needed to sterilize a healthy man are also listed by the author in

this context (322). Uris observes that Voss’ main experiments were

directed to finding a method for the mass sterilization of Jews, so that they

may be used as a labour force for the Third Reich with controlled breeding,

to keep the slave ranks filled. On the matter of the sterilization of the

Jewish race, it was agreed upon that a variety of experiments would be

performed on a minimum of one thousand healthy potent Jews and

Jewesses to get conclusive results. Speed in the mass sterilization

programme was also essential to the German purpose (325).

In Exodus Uris provides detailed historical data regarding the

concentration camps scattered over Occupied Europe, and the atrocities

perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazis. In this context the author talks about

Dachau, the biggest of the “scientific” centres. Uris notes that here Dr

Heisskeyer injected children with T B germs and observed their death.

Another instance mentioned is that of Dr Rascher who simulated high

altitude conditions in his experiments, freezing human guinea pigs to death

while they were carefully observed through special windows, this being

done for the purpose of devising means for saving the lives of German air

crews. To top it all, Uris mentions the conduct of “other experiments in

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what the Germans referred to as ‘truth in science’ which reached a peak…

in the attempted implantation of animal sperm in human females” (80).

The last two sections of QB VII entitled “Brief to Counsel” and

“The Trial” deal with the testimonies of survivors from Jadwiga West

Concentration camp, Menno Donker, Bar Tov, Daniel Dubrowski, Helene

Prinz, Eli Janos, Pieter Van Damm and Gustav Tukla, to name a few. The

various ways in which documentary authority is constructed within the

narrative, and how testimony is adopted rhetorically as a narrative strategy

in Uris’ holocaust fiction may be seen here. Incidentally, the testimonies

that Uris incorporates into the narrative are modelled on the actual

testimonies of holocaust survivors at the Nuremberg trials. Graphic

pictures of the sexual sterilization experiments performed by Dr Adam

Kelno, a Polish anti-semite surgeon who collaborated with the Nazis, serve

to foreground the image of the holocaust as an episode most undesirably

unique in human history. The message is effectively driven home through

the following comment: “Mass murders, experiments on human guinea

pigs, forceful removal of sex organs for the eventual purpose of mass

sterilization: You wouldn’t have believed this before Hitler…” (341). Nazi

callousness is effectively conveyed to the reader through a description of

the procedures in Barracks III and V of Jadwiga. The following instance

drawn by the author in QB VII serves to highlight this aspect of Nazism.

Gustav Tukla in his court room testimony recalls having been forced to

restrain patients who were having sperm tests. Prior to being x-rayed, Jews

brought to Barrack V had a piece of wood shoved up their rectums in order

to induce an ejaculation, and this sperm analyzed to see if they were potent

(312). Tukla sees Adam Kelno as “a butcher turned loose with an axe in a

slaughterhouse” (472). The scenes at Barrack V are summed up thus by

Tukla: “…a scene so macabre I can’t forget it for a single day or a single

night. Those young girls having their clothing torn from them, the screams

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of pain from the injection, the fighting and biting even on the operation

table, the blood”(472). Painful spinal injections were given by unskilled or

semi-skilled people in the anteroom without morphia, with the comment,

“We don’t waste morphia on pigs” (472). Dr Maria Viskova’s words also

bear testimony to the brutality of the surgical proceedings at Jadwiga. Dr

Viskova defines Barrack III as “A bedlam of screams and blood,” where

victims lay bleeding and screaming on wooden beds and straw mattresses

without even enough water, and the mental patients at the caged end of the

barracks becoming hysterical on witnessing the pandemonium in the

adjoining room (441). In his tale of horror Eli Janos explains how both his

testicles were removed after being told by SS Colonel Voss that as a Jew

his testicles would do him no good, because he was going to sterilize all

the Jews. Pieter Van Damm, also subjected to a similar treatment, painfully

testifies to having been reduced to a eunuch, and how his ambitions of

studying for the rabbinate had been thwarted, since the results of his

mutilation had become quite obvious (234). Menno Donker, another

victim, had hovered close to insanity after going through the same

experience. At the trial Donker testifies how he was made to take up the

violin as therapy, and how with the help of a devoted physician, he was

able to receive shots and hormones to give him a semblance of

masculinity (234).

Another instance of the Nazis using Jews as guinea pigs may be

seen in the experience of Yolan Shoret and her twin sister Sima Havely,

also related by the author in QB VII. Yolan Shoret recollects having been

taken to a room and x-rayed for around five to ten minutes along with two

other sets of twins. The experimental surgeries performed on them had left

them sick for a long period of time and almost reduced them to a vegetable

existence for the rest of their lives (360).

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The callousness with which the Nazis and their collaborators

performed these inhuman operations is highlighted by Uris through graphic

descriptions of the procedures, and Kelno’s boasts regarding the

“uncommon speed” with which he had performed two thousand surgeries,

which included an occasion in November 1943 when he had performed

fourteen operations at one session. Males were either castrated or had a

testicle removed, while women had their ovaries removed. No pre-injection

of morphia was given nor were the ovaries, uterus and veins stitched up

properly after the surgery. Further, the same instruments were used without

sterilization, and the surgeons never even took care to wash their hands

between operations, nor were anaesthetics given. X-rays were performed

by the semi-skilled radiologist Corporal Kremner, as a result of which

victims suffered irradiation burns (QB VII 328-31).

Uris’ proficiency in the medical discourse, amply demonstrated by

the profuse use of expressions and procedures of the discipline add to the

effectiveness of the novel, and succeed in lending truth value to the

author’s imaginative renderings.

Innumerable instances of such Nazi atrocities appear throughout the

length and breadth of Uris’ fiction. Elaborate descriptions of atrocities

perpetrated on the Jews by Rudolph Schreiker, Sieghold Stutze, Ilsa Koch,

Adolph Eichmann, Goebbels, Alfred Funk, Wilhaus, and numerous others

are listed in all its vividness. Here Uris employs the strategy of bringing in

well known historical figures associated with the Nazi genocide and having

them interspersed with his fictional characters. Thus in Mila 18 Oberfuhrer

Alfred Funk, a fictitious Nazi is pictured as engaging in discussions with

Goebbels about the ‘Final Solution,’ speaking about the need to eliminate

evidence regarding the “special treatment camps” by using bone crushing

machines. Further, information about the final extermination of the

Warsaw ghetto is given in the form of a report to Himmler (547-48). Also,

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such historical figures as Hans Frank, Christian Wirth, Alfred Rosenberg

and Rudolph Hoess—all names associated with the Nazi genocide—figure

in Uris’ story of the resistance at Warsaw along with fictional characters.

The author’s use of the same strategy may be witnessed in the other novels

as well. Graphic images of inhuman torture may also be perceived in

Exodus where historical characters are intermingled with the fictitious.

Here Uris brings before the reader a full pageant of Nazi terror, listing an

orgy of violence carried out by various Nazi leaders—fictional as well as

historical. These include Ilsa Koch who won infamy by making

lampshades out of human tattooed skin, Eichmann the master of genocide,

Fritz Gebauer who specialized in strangling women and children

barehanded, and who liked watching infants die in barrels of freezing

water, Heinen who perfected a method of killing several people in a row

with one bullet, always trying to beat his previous record, Frank Warzok

who liked to bet on how long a human could live hanging by the feet,

Rokita who ripped bodies apart, Steiner who bore holes into prisoners’

heads and stomachs, and pulled fingernails and gouged eyes, and liked to

swing naked women from poles by their hair, and Wilhaus who had the

hobby of throwing infants into the air to see how many bullets he could fire

into the body before it reached the ground (Exodus 79-80).

That such images of Nazi brutality are part and parcel of holocaust

writing may well be discerned through an examination of other holocaust

narratives. Elie Wiesel, the best known among holocaust writers, draws

similar pictures of Nazi bestiality in The Night Trilogy, comprising three

narratives—The Night, Dawn, and The Accident, written between 1955 and

1960. In Dawn, the narrator Elisha recounts the torture of a sculptor Stefan,

who was beaten and starved, and prevented from sleeping, day after day

and night after night. Wiesel’s picturisation of Stefan’s encounter with the

Gestapo goes as follows: “At a signal from the Chief, two SS men led the

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prisoner into what looked like an operating room, with a dentist’s chair

installed near the window… ‘As a sculptor you need your hands,’ the

Gestapo Chief went on. ‘Unfortunately we don’t need them,’ and so saying

he cut off a finger.” Wiesel draws the gory picture of the Gestapo chief

cutting off all five fingers of the sculptor’s right hand, one finger a day

(195-96).

Uris also employs the strategy of bringing in arguments for and

against the singular nature of the holocaust in order to reinforce the theme

of holocaust uniqueness. One such instance may be seen in Uris’ depiction

of the interrogation of Count Ludwig Von Romstein, a German nobleman

with Nazi leanings, by Major Sean O’Sullivan of the occupying American

forces in his Armageddon. As the Count tries to justify Nazi atrocities

through the remark, “What you saw at Schwabenwald could have happened

to any people anywhere under the same conditions,” the uniqueness of

Nazi evil is well established by the author through the American Major’s

reply: “But it never has, Count, it never has” (89). Yet another situation in

the same novel shows Romstein reminding Sean about the unjust laws

against the Negroes in America and how “Negroes are looked upon as

sub-humans by a large segment of the American people.” The Count’s

remark that the Germans did not invent race hatred is effectively set aside

by the statement, “We Americans did not invent death factories. That is

an exclusive German innovation” (86). Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury’s

report also reinforces the uniqueness of Nazi evil and German complicity

through the following words: “The Germans tell us that all men are

inhuman. True, nonetheless, when the final book on man’s inhumanity to

man is written, the blackest chapter will be awarded to the German people

in the Nazi era” (598).

The view of the holocaust as a unique event, and of anti-Semitism as

an irrational Gentile loathing of Jews is shared by many writers on the

55

holocaust. D M Thomas, Jewish novelist and poet, makes this observation

about the holocaust:

The holocaust has changed life. Whether you were

Jewish or not it added a new dimension to evil. The idea of

mass anonymous death, the thought that so many people

could be wiped out for no reason, in some ways threatened

one’s own sense of existence, one’s own soul… Even now

forty years afterwards, there is a disturbance in the

atmosphere because of what happened in the war in places

like Babi Yar and the concentration camps. (Thomas

interview in Art out of Agony 72)

Elie Wiesel also comments on the uniqueness of Jewish suffering

thus: “Only the Jewish people were designated for total murder. Only the

Jew was guilty simply because he was a Jew, which means that for the first

time in history ‘being’ became a crime. And that was true for only the Jew

and the Jewish victim, and nobody else” (Wiesel interview in Art out of

Agony 156-57).

Throughout the novels, Uris puts across several instances to

underscore the point that “All of those things which make man civilized

did not function within Germany” in the days of Nazism (Armageddon

154). The innumerable “obedience experiments” tried out on SS cadets as

well as prisoners, in the concentration camps mentioned in the novels,

serve to foreground the depths of Nazi depravity. Dietrich Rascher’s

recollections of his SS training, and the final obedience test undertaken

before receiving his SS dagger, effectively establish this point. Uris notes

that each new candidate for SS training would be assigned a sheep-dog

puppy which was to share his quarters and remain his constant companion

throughout the period of his training. Uris relates how “SS Kadet Dietrich

Rascher passed his final test of obedience with neither qualm, hesitation,

56

nor visible show of personal emotion” by snapping the neck of the trusting

animal, on receiving orders from his captain (Armageddon 191). QB VII

also throws up similar images of Nazi depravity. Here Uris paints

gruesome pictures of Otto Flensberg’s obedience experiments tried out for

the purpose of determining the breaking point of each individual—to

discover that point at which they would become robots to German

command. Two prisoners would be brought in and one asked to apply a

shock of almost 50 to 200 volts on the other, under threat of the same

treatment following refusal to comply. Readers are told how after initial

resistance, prisoners invariably reached a point when they began to obey

commands and shock fellow prisoners, so as not to be at the receiving end

themselves. Dr Susanne Parmentier, a Jewish psychiatrist appearing as

witness in the court proceedings of QB VII recalls how she had been forced

to witness experiments where a parent had been forced to kill his or her

own child in this manner, and other cases where resistance had led to death

(454-55). The one basic rule of Nazism, according to Uris, was absolute

obedience. In his analysis of the Nazi psyche Uris notes that the Nazis took

bullies and bums and made them heroes, and in exchange the bums gave

absolute obedience (Mila 124). It is also stated that like no other people in

history the Nazis were psychologically geared to destroy merely for the

sake of destroying (143). Thus Rudolph Schreiker the Kommissar of

Warsaw, pictured in Mila 18, experiences no qualm or remorse or inner

conflicts of conscience when following orders to destroy a synagogue or

murder an enemy of the party (124). Uris here isolates the Nazi genocide of

Jews as a unique event—different from all earlier instances of anti-

Semitism—through the words of Alexander Brandel the ghetto “historian”:

“Never before have we been faced with a cold-blooded, organized,

calculated, and deliberate plot to destroy us” (181). The message that Uris

puts across is that the holocaust when considered in its totality is without

57

historical parallel, and that its fanatical barbarity and technological

efficiency, the virulent political and racial ideology professed and practised

by its perpetrators, along with the world’s insensitivity to the enormity of

the human slaughter involved, when taken together, describe an event

unlike any other before or since.

Through the musings of Karen Hansen Clement, a holocaust

survivor, Uris dwells at length on the atrocities perpetrated on the Jews by

the Nazis in the various concentration camps across Europe. Uris’ narrative

at many points leaps from the history of hard facts to pure fiction and back

again. Exodus, for example, contains so much historical and political data

that it becomes a chronicle of contemporary Zionism rather than a mere

fiction. Employing the strategy of interspersing historical data with

fictional material, Uris relates the story of the Jews in Nazi-controlled

Europe who were forced from their homes, taken to concentration camps

where they were murdered by being worked to death, starved to death,

beaten to death, shot or gassed. This blending of historical data into the

fictional narrative is best exemplified in the author’s account of Auschwitz,

the greatest of all the concentration camps:

Auschwitz with its three million dead

Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with

eyeglasses.

Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with boots

and clothing and pitiful rag dolls.

Auschwitz with its warehouse of human hair for the

manufacture of mattresses.

Auschwitz where the gold teeth of the dead were

methodically pulled and melted down for shipment to

Himmler’s Science Institute…

58

Auschwitz, where the bones of the cremated were

broken up with sledge hammers, and pulverized so that there

would never be a trace of death. Auschwitz which had the sign

over the main entrance: LABOR LIBERATES. (Exodus 81)

This passage with its one sentence paragraphs, frequent

exclamations and structural parallelisms serves to remind the reader about

the historicity of Auschwitz and all its horrors, since Auschwitz more than

any other name has become synonymous with the holocaust itself. As

Lawrence A Langer notes, “Because the events of Auschwitz are still

anchored firmly in historical memory, mention of Mengele and Cyklon B

and the crematoriums are enough to remind us of the destruction of

European Jewry” (Admitting the Holocaust 98). As Uris relates the story of

the Jews in Nazi Germany and other hotbeds of anti-Semitism, readers

recall the reality of the concentration camps with their gas chambers,

crematoriums, mass graves, pseudo-scientific centres and what not. Uris’

method of placing documentary prose in apposition to works of fiction also

seems to indicate an awareness that imaginative literature on the subject of

the holocaust does not carry a sufficient authority in its own right and

needs support from without. In the Preface to his Exodus as well as in the

note of acknowledgement prefixed to Mila 18, Uris vouches for the

historicity of the events mentioned therein. This is how Uris puts it: “Most

of the events in Exodus are a matter of history and public record. Many of

the scenes were created around historical incidents for the purpose of

fiction.” The same idea is conveyed in the note of acknowledgement

prefixed to Mila 18: “Within a framework of basic truth, tempered with a

reasonable amount of artistic license, the places and events described

actually happened” (1). Regarding the characters also, Uris admits that

there may be persons alive who took part in events similar to those

described in the book, on account of which they may be mistaken for

59

characters in the book. (Preface to Exodus). Similar statements may be

discerned in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of Mila 18 as well: “The

characters are fictitious, but I would be the last to deny there were people

who lived who were similar to those in this volume” (1). Uris here appeals

to the general authority of history, even while disclaiming the historicity of

the characters, and details of the action. By mixing actual events with

completely fictional characters, the writer simultaneously relieves himself

of an obligation to historical accuracy by invoking poetic license, even as

he imbues his fiction with the historical authority of real events. Thus it

may be seen that in interspersing historical data with fictional material,

Uris makes selective use of authentic accounts of Jewish suffering along

with concoctions of the novelist’s imagination, which makes it impossible

for the common reader to distinguish between the two.

In Mila 18, Uris makes fiction appear as the literal transcript of fact,

employing as a central part of his narrative technique the “recovery” of

historical records. Part of the story is presented in the form of extracts from

the Journal of Alexander Brandel. Through the words of Brandel, Uris

itemizes the innumerable instances of cruelty and heroism, degradation and

resistance that constitute the daily round of living and dying in the Warsaw

Ghetto. Uris has modelled this work on Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Notes

from the Warsaw Ghetto. An extensive literature on ghettoization

comprising diaries, survivor accounts and journals has now accumulated,

much of it centred on Warsaw, the largest and most renowned of the

European ghettos. Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem lists over two thousand such

titles (see Rosenfeld 60). Mila 18 begins with an entry from Brandel’s

Journal dated August 1939:

This is the first entry in my Journal. I cannot help but

feel that the war will begin in a few weeks. If the lessons of

the past three years are any barometer, something awesome is

60

apt to happen if Germany makes a successful invasion. My

Journal may prove completely worthless and a waste of time.

Yet as a historian, I must satisfy the impulse to record what is

happening around me. (3)

In this manner Uris invites his readers to enter the fictional world he

is about to present before them as if it were part of the historical record.

Projecting a fictionalized “historian” of the ghetto as his narrator, Uris aims

to capture something of the authority that belongs to the eye witness

accounts of events that we find in the best of diaries and journals. By

stepping into the shoes of the historian, Uris stakes claims to having spelt

out the truth regarding the gruelling experiences of the Jewish past.

Uris’ novels echo the standard holocaust dogma, that driven by

pathological hatred, the German people leapt at the opportunity Hitler

availed them to murder the Jews. In his Armageddon Uris discusses at

length the issue of German complicity in the Nazi genocide .This is very

well made evident in the words of Ulrich Falkenstein, a German

Communist and a former inmate of Schwabenwald: “there was an iota of

Nazi in them all” (147). A similar view is expressed through the person of

Major Sean O’Sullivan who sees Nazism as “the historical and political

expression of the entire German people” (25). The blacklisted Nazis are

here described as the “heart of the Nazi cancer,” the whole German body

being infected with the same cancer. The point is further reinforced in

Sean’s answer to Count Romstein’s plea that an entire nation cannot be

blamed for the doings of a handful of Nazis, by placing photographs of

Nazi Germany before the German nobleman. Images of the City Hall

Square buildings covered with swastika bunting, of long rows of brown-

shirted SA men and thousands more in black shirts and death’s head

insignia holding swastika standards, tens of thousands in Hitler Youth and

SS uniforms holding the Nazi salute, with thousands who could not jam

61

into the Square listening over loudspeakers in joined barges on the river,

ecstatic masses crying out at the sight of Hitler, and hysteric shouts of

“sieg heil,” brought in by the author, serve as an effective answer to the

German plea: “we did not know” (89) and, “we were only following

orders” (136). Further, through the words of Sean, Uris also drives home

the point that if a few million or even a few hundred thousand Germans

had had the guts to stand up and refuse to commit crimes in the name of

their country, the situation would have been very different (136).

Yet another narrative strategy employed by Uris in the novels, is the

projection of Hitler’s “Final Solution” as the climax of a millennial Gentile

hatred of the Jews. Tracing a history of anti-Semitism in Europe down to

the rise of Nazism in Germany, the message that Uris puts across is that the

Jews perished because all Gentiles, be it as perpetrators or as passive

collaborators, wanted them dead. In each of the novels dealing with the

holocaust, Uris portrays the sufferings of Jews from the perspective of

earlier anticipatory events. The implications are that one cannot confront an

Auschwitz or Babi Yar head-on and hope to comprehend it, but that their

foreshadowings may be glimpsed in the profound sufferings of antecedent

eras. For instance, Book Two of Exodus, while relating the story of Ari

Ben Canaan, begins with the historical background of anti-Semitism in

Russia. With its broad historical sweep, Exodus makes ample use of

flashbacks—sometimes several generations’ back—to explain the

characters’ situation. Here Uris goes back to the days of Czarist Russia

when Jews were isolated in the Jewish Pale of Settlement where the only

regular visitors were the tax collector, and the Cossacks, peasants and

students who screamed for Jewish blood. Uris also observes that the

Russian Government had made anti-Semitism a deliberate political weapon

and secretly drummed up, sponsored, or condoned bloody pogroms in

which the ghettos of the Pale were sacked, women raped, and much Jewish

62

blood shed (200). In the course of picturing the story of the Landaus, Uris

also touches upon the laws against the Jews in Poland, Jew-baiting during

the Cossack uprising, and lists atrocities against Jews, such as infants being

thrown into open pits and buried alive, and of half a million Jews being

slaughtered during pogroms. Also, while the story of Johann Clement, a

German-Jewish scientist, is told, Uris brings in an elaborate report on anti-

Semitism in Europe from the Middle Ages — of the persecution of Jews in

Spain and East Europe, down to the rise of Nazism in Germany. This long

account closes with the authorial comment: “Anti-Semitism was

synonymous with the history of man. It was a part of living—almost a

scientific truth” (60). According to Uris, “Jew-hating is an incurable

disease” (Exodus 219). QB VII character Thomas Bannister sees anti-

Semitism as “the scourge of the human race,” as the “mark of Cain upon us

all” (495). The author also notes that under certain democratic conditions it

may not flourish well or may even appear to die, but never really dies even

in the most ideal climate. The story of Alfred Dreyfus is brought up to

underscore the point (Exodus 220).

While painting graphic images of Nazi atrocities against Jews in the

occupied countries of East Europe, itemizing the innumerable instances of

cruelty and degradation perpetrated on them, Uris never fails to bring in

instances which serve to highlight the apathy or even the active

collaboration of the local “gentile” population. A case in point is the

author’s graphic description of Jews being shot dead and buried in

countless numbers in the pits of Babi-Yar—of thousands stripped naked,

lined up at the edge of the pits and shot in the back— and then bayoneted,

another thousand marched in and put to the same fate. According to Uris,

thirty three thousand met the same fate in three days, and the local

Ukranians cheered every time the guns went off (Mila 286). Uris also talks

about the Polish hoodlum gangs who were constantly on the look out for

63

escaped Jews to extort, or turn in for reward money. Also, very few Poles,

according to Uris, ran the risk of harbouring a Jew (Exodus 121). The point

is further foregrounded in the callousness of the Polish peasants who refuse

even to pass snow to the starving Jews who are carted off to the death

camps. The issue of Gentile collaboration is further underlined in the

author’s citation of the large number of Lithuanians and Latvians serving

in the German auxiliary troops, and references to the peasants from the

Baltic who carried out their share of the East European massacres (Mila

324). These are images that portray a unique condition of absolute

forsakenness which the Jews were subjected to—a forsakenness which

could be remedied only with a homeland and all that it entails.

The author repeatedly harps on the point of gentile indifference in

his narrative. Uris notes that no uprising could be staged in Poland even

after the mass extermination of Jews, because there was no support for it in

Poland outside the ghetto, and that the Jewish appeal to the Poles to join

them and strike against the enemy had fallen on deaf ears. The response of

the Polish Underground, according to Uris, is not different. This is made

clear through the comment of Roman the Commander of the Home Army

in Warsaw with regard to the fate of the Jews: “no one really gives a damn”

(Mila 381). Further, it is also noted how the report on the extermination

camps, handed over to the Polish Underground to be smuggled out of

Poland and made available to the world press, had been sold to the

Gestapo. Uris also includes the Catholic Church of Poland in his list of

passive collaborators as he presents Archbishop Klondonski turning a deaf

ear to Gabriela Rak’s requests on behalf of the Jewish Orphans and Self-

Help Society in the ghetto. It is further stated that most convents and

monasteries were unwilling to take in Jewish children while some even

demanded as much as ten thousand zlotys a head in advance, with the right

to convert them to Catholicism (Mila 380).

64

In his quasi-historical work Jerusalem Song of Songs also, Uris

makes references to the battering of Jews on the European Continent, and

places the Church as playing an active role in “fuelling the sport of Jew-

baiting.” Here the author lays special emphasis on the role of the Eastern

Orthodox Church which was “especially venomous towards the Jews and

perpetuated libels that flared into these massacres” (246). Thus, whether it

be highlighting the refusal of East or West Europe to help the Jews, or

British refusal to grant visas to Jewish refugees escaping to Palestine on

unsafe boats, they all serve the purpose of driving home the same

message—the “abandonment of the Jews,” if not the “war against the

Jews.” Incidentally these are themes which have become a staple of

holocaust discourse.

Similar images of “gentile” indifference or collaboration may be

seen in most holocaust narratives. For instance, in The Night which

remains one of the most acclaimed of Holocaust narratives, Elie Wiesel

presents an account of the train journey to Buchenwald when the Jews had

lived on snow, being given no food. As an instance of German sadism,

Wiesel recalls an incident on the train when a German workman had taken

a piece of bread out of his bag and thrown it into the wagon merely to

watch the stampede—the mad scramble of the starving men, throwing

themselves on top of each other, behaving like wild beasts of prey, with

animal hatred in their eyes—for a few crumbs (105).

The ever-recurring image of the Jew as scapegoat also finds echo in

the novels of Uris. Uris throws light on the “irrational essence” of anti-

Semitism in his treatise on anti-Semitism, given through the words of

Alexander Brandel, the ghetto historian. Brandel sees Polish anti-Semitism

as the irrational hatred of the frustrated common man who has long been

exploited by the nobleman. Because he cannot hit at the nobleman, the

gullible peasant, according to Brandel, who has been convinced by the

65

nobleman that it is the Jew who has brought him to a state of poverty,

“beats up the little Jew who cannot fight back” (73). Uris also notes that

the Poles had willingly accepted the traditional Jewish scapegoat as the

true cause of their latest disaster, that is, the Nazi occupation of their

country (Mila 130). The musings of Karen Clement, interned by the Britsh

at La Ciotat refugee camp in Cyprus, also highlight the “irrationality” of

anti-Semitism. The following statement serves to underscore the point:

“...Karen asked herself the same question that every Jew had asked of

himself since the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Jews

were dispersed to the four corners of the earth as eternal drifters two

thousand years before. Karen asked herself ‘why me?’ (Exodus 83).

Significantly, even in the long passages discussing the history of

anti-Semitism and the birth of the Zionist Movement, Uris never looks into

the reasons behind the festering of anti-Semitism in Europe. The fact that

Nazi anti-Semitism developed in a specific historical context with its

attendant interplay of interests is here ignored. Instead the author offers

conjectural or even fantastic explanations for Nazi atrocities against Jews.

This is best exemplified in his Armageddon, where Uris describes the

German as a pagan who rejects belief in one God. According to Uris, the

German hates both the one-God concept and the basic laws of Western

morality, that is, the Ten Commandments. The author also adds that though

on the surface the German appears as a Christian, and as the product of

Western culture, part of his soul remains in the forest. He is “pure pagan.”

Uris’ conjectural explanation for Nazi anti-Semitism goes thus: “In order

for the German to become the pagan ... he must throw off the formal

concept of one God and God’s laws. Therefore the German must destroy

the Jew who stands between him and his pagan desires” (142). By linking

Nazi anti-Semitism to the German hatred of Jewish religious beliefs, Uris

strategically places the Christian in the same league with the Jew. Uris

66

highlights the point that the one-God concept, The Bible and the Ten

Commandments are fundamental to the Christian faith as well, and argues

that the Germans loved their warrior gods more than they loved Christ, and

identified themselves with them, rather than as Christians. Jew and

Christian are here presented as the “Same” with the German as the Pagan

“Other.” Uris seeks to underline the idea of a Jew-Christian bond as

opposed to the Nazi-pagan, through the following statement: “…to be truly

anti-Jewish, one must be anti-Christ. When you destroy the Jew, you also

must destroy Christ. Therefore, the German protests Christianity by

destroying the Jew” (142).

Uris apprehends anti-Semitism as a purely irrational gentile loathing

of Jews. That such writings are very much typical of Zionist narratives may

be made clear through an examination of Menachem Begin’s views on the

same. In The Revolt, Begin comments thus about the callous indifference

of the world to the Nazi genocide:

When man becomes a beast, the Jew ceases to be

regarded as a human being…It was not only the Nazis and

their friends who regarded the Jews as germs to be destroyed.

The whole world which calls itself ‘enlightened’ began to get

used to the idea that perhaps the Jew is not as other human

beings. Just as the ‘world’ does not pity the thousands of

cattle led to the slaughter-pens…equally it did not pity—or

else it got used to—the tens of thousands of human beings

taken like sheep to the slaughter. (36)

Elie Wiesel’s perception of anti-Semitism is also seen to correspond

with Uris’ views. According to Wiesel, “driven by irrational arguments the

anti-Semite simply resents the fact that the Jew exists.” On the issue of

Jewish persecution down the ages, Wiesel comments thus: “For two

thousand years…we were always threatened…. For what? For no reason”

67

(qtd in The Holocaust Industry 53). However, Albert S Lindeman’s recent

study of anti-Semitism starts from the premise that “whatever the power of

myth, not all hostility to Jews, individually or collectively, has been based

on fantastic or chimerical visions of them, or on projections unrelated to

any palpable reality,” and that as human beings, Jews have been as capable

as any other group, of provoking hostility in the everyday secular world

(qtd. in The Holocaust Industry 53).

The central argument in Uris’ novels is that Jewish survival rests on

the establishment and maintenance of a sovereign Jewish state, which alone

would serve as the ultimate deterrent to injustice against Jews. This is very

well worded through the thoughts of Exodus character Mendel Landau.

Jew-baiting over a period of centuries has forced Landau, a Polish Jew, to

come to the painful realization that even after seven centuries in Poland he

was still an intruder. The image of the Jews put across by Uris is that of a

haunted, persecuted people seeking to find shelter and a state for

themselves. The vision of a sovereign Jewish state is very well

communicated by Uris through the following statement: “What Mendel

Landau gave his children was an idea. It was remote and it was a dream…

He gave his children the idea that Jews must someday return to Palestine

and re-establish their ancient state…Only as a nation could they ever find

equality” (Exodus 120).

The commonsense understanding of the persecution of Jews is that

of an unfortunate episode in contemporary history borne out of racial

hatred that can be reduced to a Jew into Nazi opposition at the height of its

intensity and expression. If this is so, it assumes the status of a passing

event in history and a memory that is short-lived. But this is precisely the

perception that Uris strives to alter. Further, Uris also foresees chances of

continued persecution of the Jews under new adversaries unless defensive

and offensive initiatives are contemplated. The works under survey are

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replete with umpteen instances of the Jews being continually persecuted

across the globe and down the ages. Instances of anti-Semitism down the

ages are cited by the author in the long sections where Uris places

documentary materials in apposition to the fictional narrative. While

discussing the birth of the Zionist Movement, Uris touches upon the

contributions of Theodor Herzl and Pinsker who had first voiced the need

for a Jewish state. This is how Uris puts it:

Theodor Herzl pondered and thought, and he decided

that the curse of anti-Semitism could never be eradicated. So

long as one Jew lived—there would be someone to hate him.

From the depths of his troubled mind Herzl wondered what

the solution could be, and he came to a conclusion—the same

conclusion that a million Jews in a hundred lands had come to

before him—the same conclusion that Pinsker had written

about in his pamphlet about auto-emancipation. Herzl

reasoned that only if the Jews established themselves again as

a nation would all Jews of all lands finally exist as free men.

They had to have a universal spokesman—they had to

command respect and dignity as equals through a recognized

government. (Exodus 221)

In all the four novels dealing with the holocaust, Uris speaks of Jews

being socially segregated, persecuted, and made victims of bloody

pogroms. While discussing the story of Jewish immigration to Palestine,

Uris follows a common pattern. Detailed accounts of Jew-baiting across

the Continent, of edicts issued against Jews, as well as of expulsions from

all over the Continent are invariably brought in to explain the context of

Jewish migration to Palestine in the 19th century as well as the early part of

the 20th century. Uris attributes the unique sufferings of the Jewish people

solely to the lack of a homeland. For instance, in Mila 18 Uris explains

69

how Polish Jews turned bitter against their homeland after being banned

from participation in Polish national life, not allowed to own or farm land

and branded as a breed apart (43). Andrei Androfsky who has made a name

for himself in the Polish Cavalry desperately seeks acceptance from his

country, but he was “always the Jew, no matter what he attained…never

able to be accepted…” (Mila 62). Never able to escape the barbs of Polish

anti-Semitism, and hounded by the Nazis, finally he embraces Zionism.

Through the words of Rabbi Gewirtz, Uris brings in the image of the Jew

as an eternal wanderer: “We are like a bird…. We are a long way from

home and we cannot fly that far, so we circle and circle and circle. Now

and again we light upon a branch of a tree to rest, but before we can build

our nest we are driven away and must fly again- aimlessly in our circle…”

(Mila 58). Uris draws a crucial distinction between the Jews and others in

this regard. Mila 18 character Ervin Rosenblum points out that in all the

world no matter how sordid the life, every man can open his eyes in the

morning in a land in which he had his beginnings and a heritage—a

privilege which was denied to the Jews (106). In the words of exhortation

addressed to his nephew Stephan in the closing stages of the Warsaw

Ghetto rebellion, Andrei emphasises the urgency of escaping from the

ghetto, to fight his way into Palestine, to “live for the ten thousand children

killed in Treblinka, and a thousand destroyed writers and rabbis and

doctors”(482).

The instances of Jewish persecution and the lingering agony that

pervaded Jewish existence ever since the Christian era provide Uris with

the necessary justification for staking claims for a Jewish homeland. The

need for the same is reinforced by the author while drawing a picture of

post-war Europe. Uris highlights the point that the Jews were unwanted

everywhere—that the Jews, desperate to flee the graveyard that was

Europe, found no place in the world that would offer them refuge. The

70

plight of Dov Landau is drawn for the reader to point to the state of the Jew

in post-war Poland, the roads of which were clogged with refugees.

According to Uris, the plight of the Jew remained unchanged, because even

though the Germans were gone, the Poles were carrying on for them. In

Poland there were no tears for the dead, but plenty of hatred for the few

survivors. Jewish shops were smashed and those Jews who tried to return

to their homes beaten up. Thus “those who ventured out of Auschwitz

came back. They sat in the muck-filled compounds, shattered, half mad,

and tragically waited to rot together. The memory of death never left them.

The smell from Birkenau was always there” (Exodus 144). Uris also notes

that few countries of the world wanted the German-Jews, that they simply

closed their doors on them.

Uris projects the impression that only one place in the world would

take in the Jew, that is, Jewish Palestine. In Exodus, Uris outlines the fate

of a collection of European Jews who rejected the Zionist exhortation to

head for Palestine and escape the barbs of anti-Semitism. For instance,

Simon Rabinsky, a poor boot maker who lives in the Jewish Pale of

Settlement in Russia in the late 1800’s, keeps aloof from the Russian

Zionist Movement on religious grounds, in spite of being subjected to anti-

Semitic attacks. He believes that it would be blasphemous to return to the

Holy Land before the coming of the Messiah. Later, during a pogrom, after

the rioters set the local synagogue on fire, Simon rushes into the Temple to

save the Torah, only to be beaten to death by an anti-Semitic mob. Another

Jew who resists the Zionist appeal with equally tragic results is Johann

Clement, a reputed German-Jewish scientist, and the very epitome of the

secular assimilated Jew, who is so loyal to his country that he does not

think about migration to Palestine even after the Nazis come to power. His

daughter Karen who survives the holocaust on account of her having been

adopted by a kindly Danish couple, later finds her father in a Tel Aviv

71

sanatorium—the once brilliant scientist reduced to permanent catatonia

after being tortured by the Gestapo. Uris’ dramatization of their terrible

fates serves to underscore the point that those assimilationist Jews who

rejected Zionism for secular reasons, as well as the Rabinskys of the world

who turned their backs to the Zionist exhortation for religious reasons, had

signed their own death warrants. Graphic images of the holocaust and the

persecution of Jews down the ages, put across by the author, provide

‘proof’ of the impossibility of assimilation, or the eradication of European

anti-Semitism, and serve to justify Jewish demands for entry into Palestine.

The image of the Jews as a haunted, persecuted people desperately

seeking a homeland, being thwarted in their efforts towards the same, is

highlighted in the author’s account of the British blockade of Palestine.

While touching on the story of Jewish migration to Palestine in the post-

war years, Uris notes that those who had survived Hitler were to board

unseaworthy boats and be further victims of the outrage of British warships

ramming them on the high seas, and “boarding and bludgeoning them into

submission” (Haj 149).Uris places the blame for the post-war turmoil in

Palestine on the British, who according to Uris had been dancing to an

Arab tune once the value of Arab oil became clear. The metaphorical

butchering of the Jews by the British is illustrated in the story of the White

Paper which had blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine in the pre-war

years. British “treachery” is again illustrated by Uris through their failure

to recognize the contribution of the Palestinian Jewish forces in the Allied

victory. Further, the British embassies and consulates throughout Europe,

according to the author, put pressure on every government to keep their

borders closed to the refugees. Thus the Jews of such anti-Semitic hotbeds

as Poland and Germany found themselves “locked in a country that did not

want them and locked out of the country that did want them” (Exodus 145).

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The story of British “betrayal” is sharply underlined by the author in

the graphic images of Jewish suffering in the refugee camps at Caraolos,

drawn in Exodus. Significantly the “barbed-wire walls,” “tents filled with

dirty and unkempt people,” “long rows of tuberculars,” “wards of bones

bent with rickets and skins yellow of jaundice and festering sores of

poisoned blood,” and “youngsters who had the hollow blank stares of the

insane,” serve to bring the reader back to the world of the Hitlerian

concentration camps which they seem to bear close correspondence with.

The need for a Jewish homeland is keenly felt in the passages describing

the condition of the children’s camp and its inmates:

…the tents of the graduation class of 1940-45. The

matriculants of the ghettos, the concentration camp students,

scholars of rubble. Motherless, fatherless, homeless. Shaved

heads of the deloused, ragged clothing. Terror-filled faces,

bed wetters, night shriekers. Howling infants, and scowling

juveniles who had stayed alive only through cunning. (56)

Uris’ narrative strategies serve to foreground the assertion that the

Jews as a racial group confront hostility throughout the world with the

singular exception of Palestine/Israel. Thus Israel is made to qualify as the

only safe haven for Jews in the world—the only guarantee against another

Jewish holocaust, and that holocausts happen only in the diaspora. After

all, Palestine is the place over which the Jew is endowed with a

providential right

Through several strategies of narration, Uris emphasises the unique

Jewish connection to Palestine, and stresses the central place of Palestine in

the thoughts, prayers and dreams of the Jews in their dispersion, and that

physical contact between the Jews and their former homeland had never

been completely broken, all of which serve to point to Palestine as the one

and only option for a homeless, dispersed, and persecuted Jewish

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community. The period of exile is here constructed as a long, dark age of

suffering and persecution, punctuated by periodic pogroms and

expulsions—a fragile existence imbued with fear and humiliation. The

message that Uris puts across is that the Jews suffered persecution on

account of their homelessness and that only the restoration of the Jewish

nation in its ancestral homeland would end this persecution. The author

also makes crystallize in the mind of the reader the idea that the long

sought Jewish national homeland brought into existence through the UN

Partition Vote was rightly brought into being by a horrified, conscience-

stricken international community which viewed Israel as the necessary

refuge for Jews throughout the world who had become victims of the Nazis

and their followers.

Uris’ writings are replete with suggestions that the Jews had never

ceased to yearn for Palestine which they had always regarded as their god-

given national home—that they had at no time abandoned hopes of

returning to it. Psalm 137 of The Bible, symbolizing the yearnings of the

Jews for Palestine is made the lament of many a Jewish character in Uris’

novels. For instance, Simon Rabinsky living in the Jewish Pale of

Settlement in Russia is shown repeating in the course of his daily prayer,

“the same lament that had been said by Jews since their captivity in

Babylon”: “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her

cunning… Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not

Jerusalem above my chief joy” (Exodus 198). The prayer would invariably

end with the Passover refrain, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Psalm 137 of The

Bible, symbolising the yearnings of the Jews for Jerusalem, is turned into

an uncompromising weapon by Uris to establish the Jewish claim to the

land. Jerusalem is here presented not only as a physical homeland but also

as a metaphysical land that the Jews carried with them wherever they went.

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Several instances highlighting the strong Jewish affinity for their

homeland may be seen throughout the length and breadth of Uris’ fiction.

A case in point is the author’s picturisation of the elation experienced by

Yakov and Jossi Rabinsky who after fleeing from the Zhitomir Ghetto in

Russia finally reach the hills of Judea after months of perilous travel, and

have their first glimpse of “The City of David” from the peak of the ridges.

This is how Uris puts it: “Jerusalem! Heart of their hearts—dream of their

dreams! In that second all the years of privation and all the bitterness and

suffering were erased” (Exodus 217). Descriptions of the uninhibited cries

of emotion of the refugees from post-war Europe, as well as from the Arab

world arriving at Palestine, some falling on the holy soil to kiss it,

depictions of the “hysteria of laughing and crying and singing and joy”

which burst from the children as The Exodus arrived at Haifa (306), of “the

near magic effect of the two words, ‘Eretz Israel’ on the children” of the

Exodus (193), the attachment the orphaned Jewish children had formed for

Palestine, (328) and “the tremendous curative powers of Palestine for the

worn out refugees” (347), provided by Uris at several points in his

narrative, all serve as indices of the author’s determination to establish the

strong Jewish affinity for their “homeland.” The Jewish claim to Palestine

is further extended in the concluding pages of Exodus through the words of

Karen Clement—a holocaust survivor—where the Jews are projected as a

people specially chosen by God to be on the land of Israel, to guard His

laws and work for the redemption of mankind: “This little land was chosen

for us because it is the crossroads of the world, on the edge of man’s

wilderness. This is where God wants His people to be …. On the frontiers,

to stand and guard His laws which are the cornerstones of man’s moral

existence. Where else is there for us to be?”(589).

The yearning of the Jews for Palestine is voiced not only through

the Jewish characters but through ‘gentiles’ as well. Mark Parker,

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correspondent for the American News Syndicate, gives expression to the

Jewish longing thus:

Have you ever seen Palestine? It’s worthless desert in

the south end and eroded in the middle and swamp up north.

It’s stinking, it’s sun-baked, and it’s in the middle of a sea of

fifty million sworn enemies. Yet they break their necks to get

there… I wonder how something can hurt so badly that can

drive them so hard. (Exodus 571).

That the Jews had never abandoned or given up claim to the “Holy

Land” is a point that Uris harps on throughout his works. In his quasi-

historical work Jerusalem Song of Songs, Uris notes that when history

permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem they responded by coming in

such numbers that by 1850 they were quickly becoming the majority

population (227). Uris also sees the Jewish experience and the “return” of

the Jews to Palestine as a unique event. The author notes that nowhere else

in history had a people who had lost their nation and been subjected to so

many attempts to eliminate them, managed to survive. Uris argues that the

Jews had never given up spiritual claim to Palestine and that when there

was no Jewish settlement in Palestine it was only because it was not

permitted. When it was permitted, no matter how severe the conditions, the

Jews always returned (245). Uris’ depictions of the Jewish “longing for

Zion” during centuries of life in exile as well as of sporadic Jewish

immigration to Palestine during those centuries serve to support the Zionist

claim for the land of Israel as its national home. The positive aspects of

Jewish exilic life are here suppressed to make way for the centrality of the

people-land bond which is further reinforced by a denial of centuries of

Arab- Palestinian life in that land.

In the novels of Uris, Jewish settlement in Palestine is never

perceived as a colonising enterprise. Instead it is seen as the “return” to a

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rightful homeland. The righteousness of the Jewish cause is placed before

the reader as Gideon Asch of Shemesh kibbutz, who enjoys a close

friendship with Ibrahim, the mukhtar of Tabah, pleads the Jewish cause

before him: “The Jews belong here…. There must be a place in our father’s

house for us. One small room is all we ask” (Haj 56). Uris also notes that

the Arabs of Palestine had “welcomed the return of the Jews and

appreciated their historic rights to Palestine and their humanitarian rights to

a homeland” and that they had “stated openly that they welcomed the

culture and the ‘Hebrew gold’ the Jews were bringing in” (Exodus 253).

Both Exodus and The Haj, while relating the story of early Zionist

settlement in Palestine, present Arab villages and Zionist settlements as

enjoying close dependent relationships. Along with creating images of

Arab opportunism, the author here puts across the idea that Arab

opposition to the influx of European Jews in the later years had been the

result of machinations by scheming, power-crazy Arab leaders, the chief

among them being the Mufti of Jerusalem.

That the concept of the “return” of the Jews from exile to the

biblical homeland in Zion—the “Promised Land”—was an integral part of

Jewish life everywhere is a standard argument in Zionist writing. This is

well illustrated in the following observation made by Joan Peters regarding

the Jewish yearning for Palestine in the diaspora:

Jewish communities were tightly knit… They spoke

their prayers with understanding and expectation of eventual

fulfilment. Their imploration for deliverance from the

austerity of exile in foreign lands and the promised

ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land was for many of

them, not mere cant recited by rote, but a sincere profession

of anticipation and desire. (88)

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Amos Oz in his work Under This Blazing Light also observes that

the land of the Jews could not have come into being and could not have

existed anywhere but in Palestine, because “this was the place the Jews

have always looked to throughout their history,” (82) the place which had

always been “the focus of their prayers and longings,” and the only place

where the Jews could exist as a free people” (83).

According to Uris, from the moment the hitherto downtrodden

Jews set foot on the soil of the newly established state of Israel, they were

granted a human dignity and freedom that most of them had never known,

which fired them with a drive and purpose without parallel in man’s history

(Exodus 571). Uris repeatedly foregrounds the need for the establishment

and preservation of a sovereign Jewish state, stressing the point that only in

an independent Israel could the Jew live in dignity. The following words

addressed by Jordana Ben Canaan, to the children who had arrived on The

Exodus convey the message effectively: “You are in Palestine now and

never again do you have to lower your head or know fear of being a Jew”

(Exodus 336). The same point is reinforced in the concluding pages of

Exodus, where Uris talks about the migration of Jews to Israel, from

seventy four nations. According to Uris, “the dispersed, the exiles, the

unwanted came to that one little corner of the earth where the word Jew

was not a slander” (571). Commenting on the exodus of the Jews from

different parts of the earth following the formation of the state of Israel,

Uris observes that no Jew was turned away from the doors of Israel.

According to the author: “It was not a melting pot, it was a pressure

cooker, for they came from every corner of the earth and had lived under

every variety of circumstance” (571). The full gamut of Israeli propaganda

regarding Jewish claims to Palestine is suitably summed up in the form of a

reported broadcast over Kol Israel at the end of the British Mandate which

incidentally is an adaptation of the Declaration of Independence read out

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by David Ben Gurion before the leaders of the Yishuv, at Tel Aviv on 14th

May 1948.

The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish

people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity

was formed—here they achieved independence and created a

culture of national and universal significance. Here they

wrote and gave the Bible to the world… Exiled from the land

of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the

countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope

for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.

(Exodus 518)

In the novels of Uris, the basic claim to Palestine is woven round the

Old Testament sacralisation of the geography and the notion of the

hereditary holiness of a people chosen by God for His ministry and for the

redemption of mankind. The message that Uris puts across is that Palestine

had been given to the Jews as an everlasting possession which always

remained theirs, for them to return to whenever they wished or could, even

if it was after a few thousand years. To this divine right is added the

demand that the world must compensate the Jews for all the discrimination

and oppression perpetrated on them by the ‘gentile world.’

Uris makes much of the Jews’ “historical right” to Palestine—a

“right” that has been much highlighted in Zionist writing. However,

Norman G Finkelstein points out that Zionism’s “historical right” to

Palestine was neither historical nor a right. Finkelstein notes that it was not

historical in as much as it avoided the two millennia of non-Jewish

settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside

it. Finkelstein also notes that it was not a right except in the Romantic

mysticism of “blood and soil,” and a Romantic cult of “death, heroes and

graves” (Image and Reality 101).

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The Jews’ “historical right” to Palestine is further stressed through

the author’s drawing a thin but crucial line of continuity—an unbroken

connection between the Jews and Palestine—by bringing in a reference to

the Cabalists “whose history in Palestine was one of the longest unbroken

records of Jewish habitation of the “Holy Land” (Exodus 363). It is hereby

asserted that physical contact between the Jews and their former homeland

had never been completely broken. These assertions strike perfect chords

with traditional Zionist claims regarding the Jewish connection to “Eretz

Israel.” For instance Yehuda Bauer states that a large section of the Jewish

population of Palestine were not exiled after the destruction of the second

Temple in 70 C E and that even though their numbers diminished gradually

under external pressure, they had repeatedly attempted to regenerate

themselves in Palestine since then. Bauer also speaks about the

uninterrupted Jewish occupation of villages in the hills of Galilee from the

Roman times to the present which “testify to the strength of Jewish

attachment to the land.” It is further stated that Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron

and Tiberias had significant clusters of Jewish population prior to Zionist

settlement and that Jerusalem has held a Jewish majority ever since the first

population counts were made in the mid-nineteenth century (The Jewish

Emergence 42).

Uris highlights the point that Israel serves as a spiritual entity to its

inhabitants, and in the process brings in illustrations which serve to

underline a close binding between the land and its people, and also offers

explanations as to what it means to be a Jew, and why the Jew must suffer

in order to be true to his faith. What the land of Palestine means to the Jew

is very well illustrated by the author in Exodus through the words of Dr

Lieberman, one of the founders of the Youth Aliyah village of Gan Dafna:

We Jews have created a strange civilization in

Palestine…. The eternal longing of the Jewish people to own

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land is so great that this is where our heritage comes from.

Our music, our poetry, our art, our scholars and our soldiers

come from the kibbutz and the moshav…all the windows of

the children’s cottages face the fields of the valley so their

land will be the first thing they see in the morning and the

last thing they see at night… (343)

A dominant narrative strategy used in the novels of Uris is the

attribution of uniqueness on all things associated with the Jews and Israel.

These include their sufferings down the ages and their resistance against

the might of their oppressors. Above all, Jews as a category are invested

with uniqueness as God’s chosen people. The struggle of the Jews,

whether it be against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or against

the Arabs in Palestine, is always pictured as a ‘unique’ struggle between

unequal forces, with Jews fighting using fire bottles and home- made

explosives of nuts and bolts against tanks and sophisticated weapons.

This is best exemplified by the author in Mila 18 through the final entry

in Alexander Brandel’s Journal, made by Christopher de Monti the

American journalist, who sums up the situation after the final destruction

of the ghetto. The image of unequal forces engaged in a unique struggle is

brought into focus here:

What of the Warsaw uprising? How does one

determine the results of such a battle? I look through the

books of history and I try to find a parallel. Not at the Alamo,

not at Thermopylae did two more unequal forces square off

for combat. I believe that decades and centuries may pass,

but nothing can stop the legends which will grow from the

ashes of the ghetto to show that this is the epic in man’s

struggle for freedom and human dignity. This rabble army

without a decent weapon held at bay the mightiest military

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power the world had ever known, for forty two days and

forty two nights. It does not seem possible, for many nations

fell beneath the German onslaught in hours. (562)

It is equally important to discern the conspicuous role of collective

memory in the narrative scheme of Uris. The collective memory of the

Jews is drawn from the Old Testament and the political history of ancient

times, as well as from the days of the ‘holocaust’—in both cases what is

made obvious is the significance of inherited memory. It is significant that

whenever instances of Jewish heroism are brought into the narrative, the

author places it in the specific context of Jewish persecution down the

ages, and the miraculous Jewish victory—the victory of the weak over the

strong—the defeat of tyranny and greed by the cause of justice and

freedom. Key scenes in Exodus and Mila 18 which provide pictures of

gallant Jewish stands against the Nazis or the Arabs are placed in a history

of Hebrew revolts against powerful oppressors. The heroic stands of the

ancient Hebrews under the leadership of Judah Maccabee and Bar Kochba

are invoked time and again in the two works. The valiant stands of the

Jewish people at Herodium and Machaerus, Masada and Beitar, and Arbela

and Jerusalem are cited to drive home the point that the Jews had

established the tradition of “fighting to the last man.” In Zionist collective

memory the Bar Kochba revolt symbolises the nation’s last expression of

patriotic ardour and the last struggle for freedom during Antiquity. The link

drawn between Bar Kochba and his men, and the new Zionist pioneers,

serves to construct historical continuity between Antiquity and the Zionist

national revival. Referring to the Jewish defenders’ courage in rebelling

against the Romans and in sustaining their resistance long after the rest of

Judaea had been defeated, Uris stresses their heroic spirit, devotion and

readiness to fight until the last drop of blood to defend their nation’s

freedom at all costs rather than yield to their oppressors. Uris’ references to

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the heroic stand of Josef Trumpeldor at Tel-Hai which symbolises the

Jewish commitment to build new settlements in Palestine and to defend

them at all costs, also stresses the theme of “the few against many,” which

according to the author encapsulates the Yishuv’s as well as the later

state’s experience in the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, it may be noted

how Uris draws upon, and even transforms, Jewish collective memory and

tradition selectively in his interpretation of the past. For instance, the battle

of Tel Hai in which several settlers died and the remainder fled becomes a

myth of successful defense and a symbol of “no retreat” in Uris’ Exodus.

The retreat from Tel Hai is converted into an instance of successful defence

and a historical model of never abandoning a Jewish settlement. Similarly,

Bar Kochba, the leader of a revolt that was defeated, is represented as a

legendary hero who led the Jewish people to freedom. While the Bar

Kochba revolt resulted in destruction, death and exile for the Jews, Uris

transforms it to a glorious celebration of Jewish courage and determination.

The ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus describes in detail the

Masada episode in which men killed women and children and then killed

themselves, leaving nearly a thousand people dead (see Winbolt ix - x).

Uris on the other hand depicts it as an inspiring example of the Hebrew

determination to fight until the last drop of their blood for the defence of

their nation. Thus Masada, a historical episode that is believed to have

ended with a collective suicide, is transformed into a myth of fighting to

the bitter end, and of national renewal. Uris’ invocation of the Maccabean

Revolt and the exploits of ancient Hebrew warriors which has become a

part of the Jewish and Christian tradition, serves as a memory or even a

metaphor for Jewish heroism. Regarding the tremendous impact of the

Maccabean Revolt on Judaism and the Jewish people, Solomon Grayzel

observes that these events have left their impression upon Jewish life even

to the present day and that the Maccabean era was as significant for the

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Jews as the era of the French Revolution was for Europe and America in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (52). These revolts represent the

ultimate commitment to national freedom and provide examples of the

ancient Hebrews’ readiness, when oppressed, to stand up against a more

powerful enemy and to sacrifice their lives for the nation. Uris’ invocation

of these episodes gain added significance when placed in the context of the

Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto against the military power of the

Nazis, the confrontation of the Exodus crew and passengers against the

mighty British, and of the state of Israel against the Arabs. Such figures as

Judah the Maccabee, Elazar ben Yair, and Bar Kochba who rose as leaders

of the ancient revolts would also be made to serve as viable models for the

Jews in their campaigns against the Arabs.

Aharon Appelfeld in his observations on holocaust literature

observes that unlike the survivors of the holocaust who were oppressed by

memory, when other writers, mainly people who had not experienced the

dread, tried to write about the holocaust using their imagination, the results

were far worse. According to Appelfeld, “If memory binds you to what

happened, not permitting you to differentiate between primary and

secondary, between private and general, the imagination attracts you to

the bizarre, to the exceptional, to the speculative, and far worse—to the

perverted” (xii). It is further stated that in Israel, because of the

embarrassment at the passivity of the victims, the heroism of the partisans

and ghetto rebels has been emphasised. That, according to Appelfeld, was

the need of the hour, and this emphasis has in turn created a distorted

picture as though the holocaust were entirely represented by the

marvellous heroism of the ghetto rebels and the partisans who fought for

their lives (xiii).

Images of Jewish chosenness are also put across to the reader

through the answer that Karen Hansen finds to the question as to why she

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was born a Jew: “God didn’t pick us because we were weak or would run

from danger. We’ve taken murder and sorrow and humiliation for six

thousand years and we have kept faith. We have outlived everyone who has

tried to destroy us.” Israel is here projected as “the bridge between

darkness and light” (Exodus 588-89).

Complex issues relating to the ways in which an overarching Jewish

identity is made up in the process of narration also seems significant.

Whether it be accounts of Soviet-Jewish experience, or Polish, German or

Yemenite-Jewish experience, Uris emphasises one point: “The Jew never

loses his identity” (Exodus 590). While tracing the story of the Jews in

Czarist Russia as well as in modern USSR, in Poland, Turkey, Spain, and

the Arab countries, Uris explains how the Jews retained their traditions and

faith even in the years of dispersion. For instance, the Jews in Czarist

Russia are shown as being divorced from the greater society, as a

community whose spoken and written language was not Russian but

Yiddish, and Hebrew, the language of prayer. Uris also notes that the

Russian Jews had adhered to rigid codes of business ethics inside the

ghetto and that community life pivoted around the Holy Laws, the

synagogue, and the rabbis, under whose leadership the Jews organized their

own government inside the ghetto. Besides, Uris also observes how the

Jewish community retained their ancient rituals and traditions, studied the

Torah and the Talmud, learned the oral laws of the Mishnah, the folk

legends, the Cabala, the Jewish prayers and songs, and scrupulously

observed Jewish customs and holidays even in the diaspora. Another

instance related is that of the Spanish Jews who, when forced to convert to

Catholicism in the days of the Inquisition, whispered a Hebrew prayer

under their breath after saying the Latin prayer aloud (Exodus 330). Uris

also relates how the Jews in the ghettoes of Poland held on to their faith

and culture and turned for guidance to the laws of Moses, which had

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become a powerful binding force among them (Exodus 113). Another

instance mentioned in Exodus is that of the Yemenite Jews who, refusing

to convert to Islam, kept the Torah, observed Jewish holy days, knew

Hebrew, and had their holy books written by hand to be passed down

through the generations (563). The same point is very much highlighted in

the concluding pages of Exodus in the conversation between Kitty Fremont

and Brigadier Bruce Sutherland, where Uris brings in the case of the Jews

in the USSR, who had survived government attempts to indoctrinate them

and thus make them give up their Jewish identity. Uris relates that after

thirty years of silence, in 1948, thirty thousand Russian Jews appeared on

the streets just to see and touch the ambassador from Israel (590).

According to the author, this proved that the Soviets had failed miserably

in their attempts at indoctrination. In Armageddon, Uris observes that

Russian-Jewish soldiers secretly visited the American rabbi’s house which

was a social centre for the Jewish soldiers of all the four occupying powers

in the days of the Four Power occupation of Germany, to attend services

forbidden in the Russian army. Further, Uris also cites the instance of

Heinrich Hirsch, a Russian-Jew and a prominent leader of the Russian

Communist Party, who on witnessing the torture of Heidi Fritag and

Matthias Schindler—two German-Jews leading the student agitation for

“academic freedom, democratic student power, an end to Marxist

indoctrination” and the demand for texts of Western Philosophy and

courses in religion in the Universities of the Russian Occupied zone—

deserts, and immigrates to Palestine. Further, hopes of a great aliyah from

Russia someday are also voiced by the author (590). That “the Jew never

loses his identity” is made clear by yet another example—that of Brigadier

Bruce Sutherland—whose Jewish ancestry causes him to overlook the

sailing of the immigration fleets to Palestine from Cyprus. Readers are told

how Sutherland’s mother, while on her deathbed, regrets abandoning the

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faith of her ancestors. Having denied her people in life, she expresses her

wish to be buried near her parents in Palestine. Driven by his mother’s

mystical sense of community, Bruce Sutherland gives up his commission,

seeks his Jewish identity and settles down in Israel. Both of Uris’ principal

“gentile” characters in Exodus—Kitty Fremont the American nurse and

Brigadier Sutherland who converts to Judaism, are shown to accept the

spiritual superiority of Judaism. QB VII character Abraham Cady is also

seen to note how his father had turned deeply religious in his old age.

According to Uris, “It happens to a lot of Jewish people who go away from

the faith. In the end they all want to be Jews again. The closing of the

circle” (162). After his father’s death in Israel, Abe vows on the old man’s

grave to “WRITE A BOOK TO SHAKE THE CONSCIENCE OF THE

HUMAN RACE,” (163) which is to be a book on holocaust atrocities. It is

also seen that while Abe is in Israel, his son Ben, and daughter Vanessa

embrace their Jewish identity and migrate to Israel. Abe’s extensive travel

in researching the book is reminiscent of Uris’ own travels and research for

his Exodus. The numerous instances of diasporic Jews holding on to their

Jewish faith, as well as of assimilated Jews seeking their Jewish identity,

mentioned in Uris’ fiction, clearly establish the fact that Uris attempts to

provide a comprehensive identity to the Jews cutting across geographical

barriers and linguistic divisions. The author sets out to prove that none of

the usual identity markers are as strong as those that are intrinsically

Jewish. While identity is a complex question for all the other peoples of the

world, it is not so for the Jew. For the Jew, his Jewish identity is primary,

not threatened by competing identity markers such as language, colour,

occupation, political ideology and so on. In short, it is the notion of a

monolithic Jewish identity that has been conjured up by Uris. However, it

may be noted that Uris, while emphasising the notion of consensus, totally

sidelines the tensions that prevailed within the newly created citizenry of

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pan-Jewish people in Israel. Much has been written about the plethora of

varieties and differences prevalent within the state of Israel. For instance,

Nicholas De Lange points out that the unity of the Jewish people is

something of a myth, that Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues in Israel

exist side by side in some towns, because the two communities do not feel

that they have enough in common to worship together, and that the

differences between Jews of different ethnic or geographical origins,

religious denominations, and social classes remain all too visible in spite of

the enormous amount of resources and efforts that have been devoted to

forging a unified and homogenous society (43).Clive Jones and Emma

Murphy have also made certain crucial observations regarding the main

cleavages that define the political landscape in Israel—the communal

divisions between Ashkenazi Jews and those of an Oriental Mizrachi

background, and religious dissonance between the ultra-Orthodox Jews and

the main body of secular Israelis. Jones and Murphy also note how the

Jewish immigrants from Arab, African and Asian lands were humiliated by

sanitation, medical and security procedures in the transit camps, and from

there herded as cheap uneducated labour into the development towns—the

poverty and deprivation of which soon led to their being likened to the

ghettoes of the Jewish past—after their arrival in the newly formed state.

Institutional and social discriminatory practices prevented their upward

mobility and led to the deliberate abuse of their human rights. It is further

stated that the Oriental community arriving in Israel quickly became

convinced that racial integration in fact meant the economic, political and

cultural domination of European Jews over Oriental Jews (23). Tracing a

history of the diasporic Jewish community of Cochin, Edna Fernandez

recounts the disappointed reactions of Abraham Eliavoo, who had chosen

to make the aliyah to Israel, seeing it as a spiritual homecoming:

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But having returned ‘home,’ Abraham found the

Jewish observances were often ignored in this modern,

secular nation. The pace of life was faster, more expensive,

less bound by tradition. In his late seventies, he found

himself living the eternal dream in the Holy Land, yet

somehow the spiritual moorings of his life had been

loosened. Now after thirty years, he was thinking of returning

to India. (188)

Uris also presents the Jews as a people who have a “fantastic

loyalty” for one another (Exodus 180), and “who stick together like flies,”

which makes it difficult for the British in the days of the Mandate to get

Jewish informers (Exodus 102). Jewish fellow-feeling is further

highlighted in the author’s account of mass prayer meetings held by Jewish

communities across the world—in the United States, South Africa, Great

Britain, Argentina and so on, for the safety of the children on the Exodus

(183) as well as in the hospitality provided by fellow Jews from Turkey to

the Levantine Coast for the Rabinsky brothers fleeing from the Russian

Pale to “the Promised Land” (212). Uris’ definition of Zionism in Exodus

goes as follows: “Zionism is a first person asking money from a second

person to give to a third person to send a fourth person to Palestine” (83).

The author’s reference to the mass aid given by Jews in the United States

and elsewhere, both in the days of the early settlement as well as in the

period following the establishment of the State of Israel, reinforces the

image of Jewish fellow-feeling.

A crucial strategy that the author engages to connect the disasters of

the past with potential dangers for the present is to draw a link between the

Nazis and the Arabs. In the author’s scheme of narration, the Mufti of

Jerusalem appears as Himmler’s friend. Uris also talks about the Mufti’s

unsuccessful attempts to stage a coup in Iraq to deliver the country to the

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Germans. As he fled to Germany, he is said to have been entertained

personally by Hitler (Exodus 296). Besides, Uris also makes out a long list

of Arab treachery—one instance being the case of the Egyptian Chief of

Staff selling military secrets to the Germans. Uris also states that King

Farouk refused to give the British even a single soldier for the defence of

Egypt against Rommel, and that Ibn Saud, though an avowed friend of the

British, did not offer even a single camel to the British 8th Army. The list of

Arab betrayals concludes with the comment: “In all the Middle East the

Allied Powers had but one true fighting friend—the Yishuv” (297). Uris

gives greater credence to the argument by bringing in the same point in his

quasi-historical work Jerusalem Song of Songs where it is alleged that Haj

Amin the Mufti of Jerusalem, after the failure of the Arab Revolt of 1936,

had fled to Nazi Germany where he ended up broadcasting for Hitler and

recruiting Arabs into Axis units (263-64). Uris also draws a picture of the

Jewish contribution to the Allied war effort. The author notes that the

Hagannah had assisted the British during the invasion of Syria by the pro-

German Vichy France, when thirty thousand Palestinian Jews had fought in

the British Army. Uris provides a stamp of authenticity by stating that it

was during this operation that Moshe Dayan had lost his eye. Uris states

that while the Palestinian Jewish Brigade saw action on behalf of the Allies

on the Western desert of North Africa, in Ethiopia and in the final battles in

Italy, none of the Arab states which the British controlled, made any

meaningful military contribution to the Allied cause. The case of Egypt is

cited to establish the point. Uris observes that although Egypt was a British

base, Arab officers including Anwar Sadat “distinguished” themselves by

being sent to prison for pro-Nazi activities and that at one juncture, when it

appeared that Rommel’s Desert Corps would conquer Egypt, Cairo was

festooned with swastikas to greet the “liberators”. According to the author,

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sympathy for the German cause prevailed even in the Arab countries under

French domination (Jerusalem 265-66).

In the same way as we are told of an Arab - Nazi alliance by Uris,

we also hear of a Jewish - Nazi alliance. For instance, David Hirst and

Irene Beeson have pointed out how early in 1941, when it appeared that

Nazi Germany might well win the war, leaders of the Jewish revolutionary

Stern gang tried to forge a military alliance with Hitler against Britain,

which as the Mandatory power in Palestine, they regarded as the main

enemy. The unsuccessful proposal was that Jews in Nazi Europe would be

conscripted into an army under the control of the Stern which would then

make war on Britain in Palestine, creating a fascist Jewish state in league

with Nazi Europe (279). In both the cases the alliances may better be

construed as short-term agreements targeted against a common enemy. To

the Germans, Britain and her allies were their arch enemies in their battle

for military/political supremacy, whereas the British were enemies for the

Arabs and Jews as their colonial masters. In other words, there was no

ideological common ground for the alliances and hostilities in the complex

web of relationships that developed.

Uris sees the state of Israel as surrounded by predatory hostile Arab

forces bent on destroying the nascent state. By extension the reader is left

to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to

destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel. It is no wonder that in the

wake of Israel’s expansionist policies and occupation of Palestinian

territories, pro-Zionist writings deliberately sought to tar the Arabs with

Nazism. The Arabs are perceived as an extension of Hitler whose aim is to

finish off the Nazis’ job.

James Young in his observations on anti-war poetry in Israel recalls

that in the reflections of writers and soldiers at kibbutz Ein-ha-Horesh after

the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli soldiers explored the extremely

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complicated relationship between collective holocaust memory, their

reasons for fighting in the war, and their understanding of the enemy.

Surprisingly, even twenty-two years after the Second World War, Israeli

soldiers came inevitably to see themselves as little more than another

generation of Jews on the brink of a second great massacre and responded

in battle as if the life of an entire people depended on it (see Young 134-

37). Young also notes how Muki Tzur, an Israeli soldier, had commented

that the inherited memory of the holocaust constituted his primary reason

for fighting, the impetus driving him and his comrades, all now identifying

figuratively with the generation of survivors preceding them (135). In

writers like Uris, where the figure of Jewish victimization is foregrounded,

one finds an attempt to keep ‘holocaust memory’ sufficiently strong in

people’s minds, so that past suffering may become a justification for

present policies.

The entire gamut of Israeli propaganda for the legitimisation of its

anti-Arab policies is suitably summed up by Uris in a classic statement

made in his Exodus: “Israel with all her other burdens had to adopt an

axiom of reality: When Hitler said he was going to exterminate the Jews,

the world did not believe him. When the Arabs say it, we in Israel believe

them” (582).

Norman G Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry sees holocaust

memory as an ideological construct of vested interests and explains how

current concerns shape holocaust memory. Finkelstein notes that the

holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon for Israel

and that “through its deployment one of the world’s most formidable

military powers, with a horrendous human rights record has cast itself as a

victim state and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has

likewise acquired victim status” (3). It is further stated that considerable

dividends accrue from this victimhood—in particular immunity to

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criticism, however justified (3). The Israeli writer Boas Evron also

observes that “holocaust awareness is an official propagandistic

indoctrination, a churning out of slogans, and a false view of the world, the

real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a

manipulation of the present” (qtd. in The Holocaust Industry 41). The

memory of the Nazi extermination would then serve as a powerful tool in

the hands of the Israeli leadership and the Jewish community.

Uris’ holocaust framework apprehends anti-Semitism as an

ineradicable, irrational “gentile” loathing of Jews. Uris’ invocation of the

holocaust serves both to justify the creation of an independent Jewish state

in Palestine and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. Uris’ repeated

references to the charge of irrational gentile hatred serve to create the

impression that in a context where gentiles are intent on murdering Jews,

Jews have every right to protect themselves in whatever way they deem fit.

In such a situation even aggression and torture could be interpreted as

legitimate self-defence.

A major strategy employed by Uris in the novels is the stereotypical

presentation of the Jew as a superhuman who is capable of accomplishing

feats seemingly impossible. Uris makes no secret about his concern for

changing the popular image of Jews from weak, passive schlemiels into

nationalistic warriors, thereby substituting one stereotype for another. The

message is sharply etched in the author’s preface to the reprinted edition of

Exodus published in 1969:

All the cliché Jewish characters who have cluttered up

our American fiction have been left where they rightfully

belong, on the cutting-room floor. I have shown the other

side of the coin and written about my people who, against a

lethargic world and with little else than courage, conquered

unconquerable odds.

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Exodus is about fighting people, people who do not

apologize either for being born Jews or the right to live in

human dignity.

Probably the most important task performed by Uris is to place the

Jew on the threshold of a new era. The standardised image of the Jew

hitherto was that of one who was prone to pacifist suffering. However, in

the works of Uris, there is a definite departure from the mould of pacifism

and lethargy. Uris traces the switch-over from the old pacifist suffering Jew

to a new type of Jew for whom passiveness is a thing of the past. Simon

Rabinsky and Rabbi Solomon typify the older generation who believe that

“the gates of heaven are barred to those who pick up weapons of death,”

that suffering in humility and faith alone would bring the Jew salvation

(see Mila 144). The conflicting responses of Simon Rabinsky and his son

Yakov, to Zionism and the issue of ghetto defence, as well as the events

leading to the death of Simon brought in by the author in Exodus, serve to

support the argument that European Jewry collaborated in its own doom,

due to a tragic flaw in diaspora culture that counselled resigned passivity in

the face of persecution. The shift from the old to the new is very well

drawn by Uris in Mila 18 through the portrayal of two Jewish characters—

the earlier passive Rabbi Solomon who later realizes that the truest

obedience to God is the opposition to tyranny (492), and the ghetto

historian Alexander Brandel who admits to Andrei, “I took the weapons

from your hands. I am the vengeful man. Your way has been the only way”

(428). These instances underscore the author’s attempts to put across the

message that the only Messiah who will deliver the Jew “is a bayonet on

the end of a rifle” (56). Uris’ concern for changing the widely held belief

that the Jews of Europe, confronted by the holocaust, went like sheep to the

slaughter, is best exemplified in Mila 18, his fictionalised account of the

Warsaw ghetto uprising. Here the struggle of the Jews is more for dignity

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rather than for survival. That the Jewish forces in Warsaw cannot win is

quite obvious. But here Uris makes it clear that the Jewish concern is not

about winning any specific battle, but about changing the texture of

modern Jewish history by offering a supreme example of resistance. The

revolt that is planned and executed is to be an event of historical

importance. This is made evident through Alexander Brandel’s Journal

entry marking the beginning of the revolt which reads thus: “Today a great

shot for freedom was fired. I think it stands a chance of being heard

forever. It marks a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The

beginning of return to a status of dignity we have not known for two

thousand years” (429).

The revolt is important because it symbolizes the ghetto Jews’ proud

and courageous stand that led them to defend their freedom at all cost

rather than yield to their oppressors. Uris’ narrative here shifts its focus

from the outcome of the revolt to the act of rebelling. It emphasizes the

Jews’ initial success in holding out against the might of the Nazis rather

than the defeat and the final liquidation of the ghetto.

The final struggle of the Joint Forces in the ghetto is invested with

religious and mythical overtones as Uris pictures the militants celebrating

Passover in the bunkers before making their last stand. Nazi propagandist

Horst von Epp sees the remnants of the ghetto forces as “the one man in

thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious

workings of forces within his soul will stand in defiance against any

master” (423). Uris’ Jew is cast not just as a fighter but even as one

possessing strange mystical powers. This can be demonstrated from the

instance cited below. In Mila 18, the German soldier Manfred Plank tells

his commanding officer Alfred Funk that he not only cannot subdue the

Warsaw ghetto, but that most members of his battalion refuse to enter the

ghetto for fear of the Jews who fight with superhuman powers:

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Like ghosts they leaped out of the ruins on us. They

did not fight like human beings… We were compelled to

abandon our positions….. I have been decorated twice for

valour... As a result of my fearless attitude in combat I was

sent to SS Waffen training. I tell you sir… I tell you… there

are supernatural forces in there. (549)

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi states that the clarity demanded by a story

tailored to mass consumption tends to generate simplistic ideological

categories to cope with the subject of large-scale physical suffering and

submission to death, and also adds that the glorification of heroic

behaviour in documentary fiction as an attempt to redeem the dignity of the

victim entails a narrow reading of Jewish history and values (33).

However, the tales of fanatical Jewish courage related by Uris in such

novels as Exodus and Mila 18, serve to puncture the prevalent “myth of

Jewish cowardice.” But this is not all. We find Uris’ novels lending new

imaginative potentials which could radically transform Jews of ordinary

physical and mental make-up into patriotic and enterprising heroes. The

claim is well spelt out in the author’s words to Darren Garnick, “What I

had to say was something the world did not know about and Jews didn’t

know about themselves” (50).

In Exodus Uris portrays the “new Jew” who has shed the qualities

of the meek diaspora Jew. The “new Jew” living in Palestine, indoctrinated

in Zionism and filled with idealism, is brave and tough. Uris distinguishes

the “new Jew” from the old, through the following words of appreciation

voiced by Captain Bill Fry, an American-Jewish sailor who has been

engaged by the Mossad Aliyah Bet to smuggle Jewish immigrants to

Palestine in the days of the British blockade: “All my life I’ve heard I’m

supposed to be a coward because I’m a Jew…Every time the Palmach

blows up a British depot or knocks the hell out of some Arabs he’s winning

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respect for me. He’s making a liar out of everyone who tells me Jews are

yellow. These guys over here are fighting my battle for respect…” (Exodus

95). The “new Jew” is free from the fear and degradation of the ghetto Jew

(265). Uris defines the sabras as a generation which was never to know

humiliation for being born a Jew—“a strange breed made for fighting”

(Exodus 499). Introducing Ari Ben Canaan and his sister Jordana, the

author notes that they typified the children being born to the settlers of

Palestine. According to Uris, “their parents who had lived in the ghetto and

had known the fear and degradation of being Jews were determined to

purge this horror from the new generation. They bent over backward to

give their children freedom to make them strong” (Exodus 265). The sabra

in Uris’ fiction is characterized by his/her lack of fear, weakness or

timidity. He is active, self-reliant and proud. He is the product of the land

of Israel and stands in contrast to the exilic Jew. Uris’ “new Jew” is

pictured as the direct descendant of the biblical Hebrews. This is made

evident through quotations from the Bible portraying the Jews as God’s

Chosen Race. The claim of Jewish chosenness and uniqueness are given

greater authenticity when voiced by two of Uris’ gentile characters, Kitty

Fremont and P P Malcolm. To the former, Ari and his men are the “young

lions of Judea”—the ancient Hebrews themselves (357), while the latter

sees the Hebrew warrior as the finest, who lives close to ideals and is

surrounded with great glories in a land which is very much real to him. The

Hagannah is depicted as “the most highly educated and intellectual as well

as idealistic body of men under arms in the entire world” (Exodus 283).

A close examination of Uris’ Jewish stereotypes reveals the author’s

determination to oppose the prevalent exaggerated fascination with the

view of the Jews as victims and victims only. Instead of allowing the old

archetypes to stagnate, Uris, in keeping with his Zionist ideology,

heightens the contrast between the passive old Jews and the fighting new

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Jews. Uris thus proceeds to overshadow the traditional image of the pacifist

suffering Jew by conjuring up the image of a vibrant, self-assertive and

determined Jew.

Menachem Begin in his Introduction to The Revolt is seen to

express a similar Zionist concern for changing the popular image of the

passive Jew. Here Begin states that his book has been written primarily for

his own people, “lest the Jew forget again.” However, he also reminds the

“gentile” reader that

… out of the blood and fire and tears and ashes a new

specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely

unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, ‘the

Fighting Jew’. That Jew whom the world considered dead

and buried never to rise again, has arisen….and he will never

again go down to the sides of the pit and vanish from off the

earth. (xxv)

James E Young in his observations on the holocaust points out that

historians in Israel find that the commonly held stereotypes of the Jews in

Christian Europe may have underpinned traditional anti-Semitism and that

the Jews’ own limited perception of themselves as victims may have

contributed to their vulnerability (186). As in the case of current Israeli

memorial makers, Uris in novels like Exodus and Mila 18, provides

alternative icons. Thus the traditional vulnerability and weakness of

diaspora Jewry are here recalled side by side with images of the new

“fighting Jews” in order both to explain past events and to provide viable

models for the young.

To conclude, the novels of Uris reveal a characteristically Zionist

grasp of events. The author here employs several narrative strategies

including the use of historical narratives and journal entries, to place before

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the reader what appears to be an authentic account of the rise of anti-Jewish

laws and actions in Europe. The harassment, deportations and pogroms are

all presented here as being consistent with the European anti-Semitic

tradition. The mass exterminations and the unique methods employed are

also located within the context of traditional anti-Jewish persecution. The

world’s silence, the abandonment of the Jews, the sealed ports of refuge

and images of the Jewish refugees rotting in the refugee camps of Europe,

all clearly reveal the author’s Zionist agenda—that is, to highlight the need

for an independent Jewish state. However the message that Uris puts across

in all the novels is that the survivor’s return to Eretz Israel alone need not

necessarily signify an end to the holocaust. This is made evident in Uris’

projection of the state of Israel as an isolated, vulnerable nation surrounded

by hostile Arab hordes bent on destroying her. That Uris propogandizes for

Israel—the target audience being mainly American—calling for military

and moral support for Israel at a time when American public opinion was

definitely not weighed in favour of Israel, is made clear by the author

himself in his personal interview with Downey and Kallan. Written shortly

after the Sinai Campaign and Israel’s annexation of the Gaza Strip and the

Sinai Peninsula, when Israel had been subjected to heavy pressure from

both the United States and the Soviet Union to withdraw immediately and

unconditionally from the Occupied Territories, the graphic images of the

Nazi holocaust and Arab enmity, put across by the author in these novels

serve to further Israeli interests, that is, to ensure American aid to Israel,

especially in the form of weaponry, to guarantee its military might and

sovereignty. Both in Exodus and The Haj, Uris projects the state of Israel

as the upholder of democracy and “western values.” In conversation with

Sharon Downey and Richard A Kallan, Uris expresses the sentiment that

America’s own moral and physical survival is linked to Israel’s sovereignty

and also emphasises American “responsibility” to provide military aid for

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Israel. The following words clearly reveal the author’s propagandistic

intentions and validates the point that the works are an explicit

representation made from the vantage point of the Israeli present:

The West has got to support Israel because if they

don’t support Israel, they will destroy their own moral

heritage without which they cannot exist…. If Israel goes

down, the West goes down with them. I am thoroughly

convinced of this… Morally as well as strategically… What

happens to the West if Israel collapses and the Soviet Union

becomes the dominant power in the Middle East? We’d be

driving our automobiles on sunshine. Israel is the only

deterrent we have. It is the only democracy in that part of the

world, the only one that stands totally with the West. (qtd. in

Downey and Kallan 195)

Uris also adds, “Just keep the arms coming to Israel” (195). The

entry of Leon Uris and his novels based on the holocaust had been of

considerable service in turning American public opinion in favour of Israel.

The tremendous socio-political influence wielded by Exodus and its film

version has been noted by critics including Edward Said, Rachel

Weissbrod, Stephen J Whitfeld and Sol Liptzin to name a few. Andrew

Furman in his survey of Jewish-American literature on Israel since 1928

notes thus: “Exodus in fact advanced the Zionist phase in America…Uris

played a crucial role in transforming, for countless American Jews, their

nebulous affinity for the Jews in Israel into concrete, if illusory, feelings of

connectedness to, and responsibility for Israeli Jews… [the] novel also

transformed Jews abroad into ardent Zionists” (qtd. in Gonshak 2). Uris

himself has spoken about the thousands of letters which he had received

from Jews and non-Jews alike, telling him that Exodus had changed their

lives substantially, particularly in regard to young people finding pride in

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their Jewishness, and older people finding similar pride in the portrait of

fighting Jews (see Whitfield 668). Exodus sold millions of copies around

the world after its publication by Doubleday, and is counted among the

major publishing successes of all time. This may be considered as an index

of the author’s success in winning the hearts of the American public, and in

the process legitimising the Israeli attempts at expanding the borders of

their state to facilitate further immigration of Jews to Palestine.

In the novels of Uris the holocaust acquires profound capacity to

legitimise not only the making of a national identity and a home for the

Jews, but also an extended geographic space for their physical existence, and

thus to legitimise the realization of a greater Israel as envisaged by the

Jewish interpreters of The Bible. Commenting on the social impact of the

novel, Edward Said observes that Exodus did more for the Jewish state in its

early years than almost any other outside support (Politics of Dispossession

130). Midge Decter examines the reasons why Uris’ holocaust fiction has

managed to accomplish what years of persuasion, arguments, appeals, and

knowledge of the events themselves had failed to do—why people have

claimed to be converted to Zionism, uplifted, thrilled and enthralled by his

works. The answer that is found is that the novels make facts and ideas

regarding the holocaust vivid (491). The graphic images of Nazi bestiality,

of Jewish helplessness in the face of gentile indifference and collaboration

with the Nazis, and of a dispersed and unwanted people desperately seeking

a homeland, brought into sharp focus through the novels of Uris, serve to

support the author’s case for Jewish sovereignty, as well as render his

audience cognitively receptive to the argument. As Yosef Hayim

Yerushalmi notes, “The holocaust has already engendered more historical

research than any single event in Jewish history, but I’ve no doubt whatever

that its image is indeed being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the

novelist’s crucible” (qtd. in Young 98).

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The political agenda of Uris’ holocaust novels is made very much

evident through the words of Abraham Cady, the writer protagonist of QB

VII—modelled after the author himself—who is sued for libel by Adam

Kelno, a concentration camp survivor, and named in one of his books as a

Nazi collaborator: “…. as Jews we must tell this story over and over. We

must continue to protest our demise until we are allowed to live in peace”

(333). Abraham Cady’s address to the victims of the sexual sterilization

experiments, brought to testify before a British law court, serves to validate

the “holocaust industry” and the exploitation of Jewish martyrdom, for

furthering Israeli interests: “we are here because we can never let the world

forget what they did to us. When you are in the witness box, remember all

of you, the pyramids of bones and ashes of the Jewish people. And

remember when you speak you are speaking for six million who can no

longer speak…” (347).