Focusing on a journalist named Gideon Zadok, the book traces Zadok’s ancestry back to the 1880s.Īmong Uris’ other novels was “Trinity,” about Ireland’s struggle for independence, and “QB VII,” a fictionalized account of a lawsuit filed against Uris by a Polish doctor who had been called a war criminal in “Exodus.” “Mitla Pass,” published in 1988, starts out in Israel in 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis that led to the Sinai Campaign. This novel proved so successful that Joseph Heller reportedly decided to change the name of his novel from “Catch-18” to “Catch-22.” He traveled across Eastern Europe to collect material for “Mila 18,” which focused on the ghetto uprising. It later was made into a movie by Otto Preminger.Īfter “Exodus,” Uris continued to explore Jewish themes. It’s referred to as ‘The Book,’ ” he once told The Associated Press. ” ‘Exodus’ has been the Bible of the Jewish dissident movement in Russia.
“Exodus” was translated into dozens of languages and even smuggled into Communist Eastern Europe. In the world of American Jewish fiction, Uris is likely to be remembered as a step below Chaim Potok, perhaps on a par with Herman Wouk.īut readers around the world didn’t seem to care. “He tells a good story, but he’s not of lasting literary value.” People who think Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick are major Jewish writers “would say he’s just a popular writer,” Lyons said. Uris is not well regarded by critics, many of whom consider his writing crude and simple. “The mythic Israel he presented is still the mythic Israel in the heads of many American Jews,” said Sanford Pinsker, the Shadek professor of humanities at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. The story makes heroes of the Jewish underground fighters trying to smuggle Jews into Palestine in the years leading up the creation of the State of Israel - and uses this tale to retell Jewish history and Zionism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story of European immigrants making their way to Palestine and establishing the State of Israel was the basis of “Exodus.” His father had spent a year in Palestine before moving to the United States, and derived his surname, Uris, from Yerushalmi, meaning Jerusalemite, according to The New York Times.
Uris’ parents were immigrants from the Russian Empire. None of the criticism matters “as you are swept along in the narrative,” Pete Hamill once wrote in The New York Times.
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