Necrology: Leon Uris (1924-2003)

Abstract

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 666–671 Necrology Leon Uris (1924–2003) STEPHEN J . W HITFIELD MOST FAMOUS FOR Exodus, the American novelist Leon Uris died in 2003, at the age of seventy-eight. Though he wrote nearly two dozen other books, including other novels on Jewish themes, such as Mila 18 (1961) and The Haj (1984), Uris’s reputation rests on the 1958 ‘‘novel of Israel’’ that ranked first on the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen straight weeks and remained near the top of the list for over a year. The hardcover edition has never gone out of print, and by 1965 the Bantam paperback edition had sold more than five million copies. American mass taste has occasionally found a place for propaganda novels. But the most influential of these works addressed domestic problems , such as the moral horror of slavery (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the ugliness of urban working conditions (The Jungle), or the plight of migrant farmers (The Grapes of Wrath). Exodus was remarkable, and not only because it is set abroad. The book was published in an era when American Jewish interest in Israel was slight and the levels of philanthropy and tourism were, by later standards, low,1 and when ethnicity was muted or disdained as an embarrassing vestige of the receding immigrant past. There was no precedent—before or after—for an American novelist to produce a Zionist epic that would create a publishing sensation. The year that Doubleday released Exodus, former prime minister David Ben-Gurion asserted , ‘‘As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.’’2 Uris, who claimed to have flunked English three times before he dropped out of a Baltimore high school to join the U.S. Marines, was not the sort of writer who stirred the admiration of literary critics; and Jewish scholarship has paid very little attention to his work. For example, a 1. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York, 1986), 184. 2. Quoted in Edwin McDowell, ‘‘Exodus in Samizdat: Still Popular and Still Subversive,’’ New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1987, 13. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. LEON URIS (1924–2003)—WHITFIELD 667 standard work like the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers (1984) provides entries on obscure writers like Bruno Lessing and Roberta Silman, but not on Leon Uris. Not that this reference volume slights middle-brow writers. There are biographical and critical essays on Edna Ferber, Gerald Green, Ben Hecht, and Laura Z. Hobson. Even writers who distanced themselves fully from the Jewish community (like Tillie Olsen) are profiled. Or take Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (1992), which omits Leon Uris entirely but is sufficiently encyclopedic to refer to Aaron Rubin and Joe Stein, for example. (They happen to have been gag writers for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, so the volume cannot be charged with bias against mass culture.) The spleen that Uris sometimes emitted in interviews against intellectuals does not therefore seem unwarranted. The implication of literary scholar Arnold Band’s assertion, during a 1989 conference, that Exodus ‘‘is certainly a major document in modern Jewish history’’ has rarely been pursued. Only essays by Henry Gonshak and Rachel Weissbrod come to mind—and neither author, rightly, cares to make a case in terms of strictly literary merit. For Gonshak, Ari Ben Canaan is significant as the anti-shlemiel, as the alternative archetype of the fighting Jew. According to Weissbrod, that Exodus is not critically esteemed owes to Uris’s refusal to see black and white as gray. His rigid good versus evil paradigm collided with the ambiguity that is a fundamental tenet of modernism.3 A Nobel laureate who went to Jerusalem and back a decade after Uris had gone there has formulated the problem that fiction like Exodus bequeaths . Perhaps ‘‘the survivors of Hitler’s terror in Europe and Israel will benefit more from good publicity than from realistic representation...