Leon Uris:
Life of a Best Seller
By Ira Nadel
University of Texas, 366 pages

Our Exodus:
Leon Uris and the Americanization
of Israel’s Founding Story
By M. M. Silver
Wayne State University, 288 pages

Upon finally finishing Leon Uris’s Exodus, the 1958 novel that ran to well over 500 pages, Israel’s prime minister David Ben-­Gurion was famously reported as saying that as literature, the book wasn’t much, but as propaganda, it was something else again: the “greatest thing ever written about ­Israel.” Little could he have known just how prophetic his words would be. In no time at all, Exodus found its way onto the bestseller list, where it remained for an entire year, gave rise to one of the more influential motion pictures of postwar America, and made its author a household name. Leaving an indelible imprint on the American imagination, the heroic images created by Exodus were what came to mind when ordinary Americans thought about the new state of Israel.

The novel’s popularity was so widespread, so much a totem of postwar culture, that El Al, Israel’s national airline, actually fashioned a pilgrimage tour to the Holy Land in which the must-see sights embraced celebrated moments culled from the film in lieu of the age-old opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. “El Al’s unusual new tour takes you to places where Israel’s modern day Exodus actually happened. You’ll go on location to the same places where [the movie’s director] Otto Preminger took his film crew…. You’ll see all the places through the experiences that are now on film. And many of your guides will be Israeli citizens who had roles in the movie,” the airline promised, taking up several pages in the New York Times to promote the “El Al Exodus Tour.”

The making of the film itself took Israel by storm. Local interest ran so high, in fact, that one eyewitness likened the production to a “national happening.” Whether supplying the film with “thousands of odd props” and thousands of extras, clamoring for autographs, or nurturing the hope that it would shine a spotlight on Israel’s potential as a viable alternative to Hollywood, the citizens of Israel were caught up in Exodus fever.

The impact of the book on Soviet Jews was far greater still. For them, Exodus became a moral touchstone and a rallying point. The book circulated underground, in samizdat form, where its sheaves of onion skin encouraged an entire generation of young Soviet Jews to reclaim their Jewish identity. That Soviet authorities were quick to imprison those who possessed a copy of Exodus underscored its symbolic resonance. For Soviet Jews, observed Jerry Goodman, a leading activist in the Free Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s, Uris’s novel was “probably more meaningful than even the Bible.”

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Uris had high hopes for his book, but even he did not anticipate its stunning success. After all, in his time, as in ours, there haven’t been many potboilers that can lay claim, in one fell swoop, to having had such a profoundly cumulative effect on tourism, book publishing, and the Jewish psyche. What’s more, both the book and the film were initially greeted with a fair amount of grumbling and grousing, suggesting that their shelf life might be a limited one. Workmanlike rather than inspired, Uris’s novel left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to its prose, and the author’s penchant for piling on facts made it seem as if the text had more in common with an encyclopedia than a fully realized work of fiction.

The movie didn’t fare much better, at least as far as the critics were concerned. Like its parent creation, it, too, was damned at the time for being overlong, overstuffed, and turgid. An “inconclusive ‘cinemarama’ of historical and fictional events,” scoffed Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, with “so much churning around in it that no deep or solid stream of interest evolves—save a vague rooting interest in the survival of all the nice people involved.” Even more to the point was Mort Sahl’s memorable quip: the comedian stood up in the middle of a screening of the interminable film and implored, “Otto, let my people go.” The only thing the movie really had going for it was the star power of Paul Newman, who played the not-so-nice über-hero with the improbable name of Ari Ben Canaan, and the lovely Eva Marie Saint as his non-Jewish paramour.

Yet Exodus in both its iterations not only defied the expectations of its many critics but also went on to become a cultural landmark in its own right, a literary and cinematic phenomenon that crystallized, captured, and framed a historical moment. A mighty symbol of resilience and renewal, of gumption and determination, the book revealed a culture to itself. At the same time, it both solidified and modernized America’s ties to the State of Israel. Where once Bibles festooned with the flora and fauna of the Holy Land bound Americans to that part of the world, Exodus did them one better.

Given the book’s unprecedented impact, it’s no surprise that scholars of the modern Jewish experience have repeatedly wrestled with the text and its reception. Over the years, there have been many attempts to account for (and explain away) its popularity and staying power—a cottage industry of sorts, especially within the relatively new and exciting discipline of Israel studies. And now, in an odd twist of fate, two full-length studies have just been published within a few weeks of each other, both of which seek to account for the book’s hold on the postwar imagination. M. M. Silver’s Our Exodus, drawing on archival sources, including Uris’s extensive correspondence, as well as on newspaper and magazine articles of the 1950s and 60s, focuses exclusively on the 1958 book and its impact on American culture. Ira Nadel’s Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller is somewhat broader, placing Exodus within the larger context of Uris’s oeuvre, his stormy and unfulfilled life, and the history of publishing in postwar America. Like Silver, Nadel makes effective use of Uris’s letters to his agents, publishers, parents, and multiple wives to showcase the many virtues and the many failings of his subject.

Neither book fully succeeds in doing justice to its complex and often unwieldy subject. Nadel’s tends to be big on the facts: what happened and when. More of a chronicle, a logbook, than anything else, there’s little here by way of interpretation. Silver, on the other hand, is speculative to a fault, even going so far as to make the big, bold claim that the writing of the book was fueled by Uris’s entangled Oedipal relationship: Exodus was “one massive and theatrical way to win an argument with a whining Jewish mother.” Really now. At other, less sensationalist moments, Silver gives Exodus the once-over, subjecting it to the kind of rigorous textual criticism more commonly associated with the second book of the Bible.

Between them, Silver and Nadel do cover a lot of ground. Here, among other things, is what we learn: Uris believed himself to be a “man’s writer. I write about war, violence, sex…none of my books can be called a woman’s book,” he proudly told an interviewer during the waning years of his life. He was canny, even farsighted, when it came to the business of publishing, engaging in tie-ins, promotional appearances, and everything that was once foreign to, and even a tad unseemly within, the gentlemanly and clubby world of publishing. And before Uris settled on a title for his magnum opus, he considered calling it “The Big Dream,” “The Land Is Mine,” and “Awake in Glory.”

Elsewhere, we’re informed repeatedly that Exodus was an “event,” and a “major” one at that. Surely any book that was translated into 50 languages, went through 87 printings, and remained in print for more than half a century qualifies as a major event, but that’s not what Silver has in mind. He endows it with a kind of meta-significance that goes well beyond its remarkable publishing history and thereby overinflates its value. For him, Uris’s tale of Israel reborn offered a “profoundly liberating message,” “made Jews feel strong,” created a “perceptual revolution,” and “played a vital role in the recovery of Jewish self confidence after the devastation of the Holocaust.” By Silver’s lights, Exodus even helped to spread the word that America was a “Judeo-Christian” country. What a heavy load for any one book to bear.

“Empowerment,” though an anachronistic term, much less a ten-dollar word not likely to have been deployed by Uris, also looms large in Silver’s account. He turns to it often to explain the book’s grip on the Jewish body politic: “If Exodus’s heroic narrative encouraged adulation for Israel, it also produced feelings of empowerment that spilled well beyond the borders of the Jewish state,” he notes. And again: “Uris’s novel empowered readers and viewers who understood Israel’s founding story as being their own.” Nicely put. But we never do manage to find out how the book and the movie actually empowered their readers and viewers. And empowered to do what, one might ask.

As an organizing principle and as a literary conceit, “empowerment” strikes a decidedly contemporary note. It goes a long way. But it doesn’t go far enough. When all is said and done, perhaps the key to unlocking the enduring success of Exodus can be found in a letter that Uris penned to his father. “I am writing this book for the American people,” the novelist explained, “in hopes I can present it in such a way that Israel gets what she [sic] needs badly…understanding.” Despite the promotional value of a gun whose barrel faced skyward, an image that adorned billboards, movie posters, and dust jackets, the ultimate appeal of this modern-day Exodus tale may have had less to do with the pursuit of power and more to do with Uris’s sympathetic and touching portrait of a battered people clinging to life. When seen from this perspective, is it any wonder that generations of readers and moviegoers have come to regard Exodus as the gospel truth?