Who can forget freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan and his fellow “hard and powerful” Sabras Ari’s foil, nurse Kitty Fremont (the ultimate in the cool-shiksa genre), Holocaust survivors Dov Landau and Karen Clement, British general Bruce Sutherland (“Am I Jew or am I Christian?”)? These and a host of others have entered the low end of the literary canon as typologies in the narrative of the creation of Israel, of what David Ben-Gurion (himself a typology, indeed a caricature, of David Ben-Gurion!) called komemiyut, inadequately translated as “independence” but rather the concept signifying the uniqueness of Israel’s struggle for freedom and statehood.īut what was “Exodus” all about? More: what explains the impact of “Exodus” in America and in the Soviet Union, indeed the hold the novel and the movie had over successive generations of Jews? Was the novel historically suspect? To be sure. Mining the “Wild West” genre, Leon Uris’ “Exodus” sold more than seven million copies in the United States, and was the underground “bible” for Soviet Jews. An entire generation of American Jews - and Americans generally - were riveted by the 1958 best-selling novel, “Exodus,” and by the blockbuster movie two years later.
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