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
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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
39
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
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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
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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
54
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,
55
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 antiSemitism—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
56
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…
57
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
58
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
59
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 brownshirted 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
60
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
61
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 antiSemitism 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 antiSemitism 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
62
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 SelfHelp 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).
63
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 Jewbaiting.” 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 antiSemitism 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
64
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
65
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”
66
(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
67
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
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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
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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 antiSemitic 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
70
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 postwar 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, consciencestricken 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 godgiven 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 quasihistorical 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 proGerman 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 13437). 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).
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