Leon Uris, whose best-selling novel Exodus offered the world a heroic tale of the founding of Israel and an image of Jews as muscular, sunburned avengers, has died at 78.
Uris, who died of congestive heart failure on Saturday at his home on New York’s Shelter Island, was as much an adventurer as an author, and his other novels included the spy thriller Topaz; the courtroom drama QBVII; Mila 18, about the Jewish uprising in Warsaw during World War II; and Trinity, an epic about the Irish.
But it was Exodus, published in 1958, that created the biggest sensation among readers and was turned into a 1960 movie starring Paul Newman.
Millions read Uris’ detailed chronicle of European Jewry from the turn of the century to the establishment of Israel in 1948. The novel was translated into dozens of languages and was distributed secretly in communist countries.
Exodus was published just 10 years after Israeli statehood and less than 15 years after the Holocaust. The world had become used to newsreel images of emaciated Jews being marched to their death.
But Uris told a different story, of a victorious people standing tall under the desert sun.
”Clearly, Exodus’ is an ennobling version, pretty much a warless version of a very real place,” said Melvin Jules Bukiet, a professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College and editor of several anthologies of Jewish writing. ”But I think it marked a very powerful moment in terms of the perception of Israel, both for Jews and non-Jews.”
But Israeli historian and author Tom Segev criticised Uris as the ”chief mythologist of Zionism.” He said Uris drew a picture of Israel and Zionism that was glorified beyond reality, and ”it was more harmful than helpful.”
”None of us is Ari Ben-Canaan, none of us is Paul Newman,” Segev said, referring to the main character in the movie version, which also featured Sal Mineo and Eva Marie Saint.
The muscular Uris was himself a story of self-transformation, an immigrant’s son who grew rich, strong and fearless. The author traveled tirelessly, sometimes risking his life. In researching Exodus, he logged thousands of kilometres and ended up reporting on the 1956 Arab-Israeli war.
Uris also waged some of his own battles, fighting lawsuits over both Exodus and Topaz and feuding with directors Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock. Preminger reportedly fired Uris as screenwriter of the film version of Exodus, and Hitchcock was said to have done the same on the movie adaptation of Topaz.
Mila 18 (1960) was an unintentional influence on both American publishing and American slang: Its title led a rival publisher to change the name of an upcoming novel, by a then-unknown Joseph Heller, from Catch-18 to Catch-22.
QBVII, published in 1970, was based on Uris’ legal troubles with Exodus.
In 1976, Uris had great success with Trinity, a typically encyclopedic novel that traces three Irish families from the mid-19th century to the Easter Rising of 1916.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill criticised the ”excess baggage of exposition and information,” but concluded: ”None of that
matters as you are swept along in the narrative.”
Uris’ latest work, about the Marine Corps, is titled O’Hara’s Choice and was set for release in October.
Uris was born in Baltimore and grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. His father was a paper hanger and storekeeper remembered by the author as ”basically a failure.”
Uris vowed to do better, even if he did fail English three times and never graduated from high school. After serving with the Marines in the South Pacific during World War II and fighting at Guadalcanal, he began submitting articles to magazines. He finally had a piece, The All American Razzmatazz, published in Esquire in 1951.
His first book, Battle Cry, was released in 1953 and made into a movie. Two years later, he came out with The Angry Hills, a spy novel, and in 1956, he traveled to Israel to begin research on Exodus.
”I used to think of myself as a very sad little Jewish boy, isolated in a Southern town, undersized, asthmatic,” Uris said in a 1988 interview. ”When I read all my correspondence again, I realised I was a hustler. I was tough. I used everything to my advantage. I could be very ruthless. I hurt a lot of people on the way up.”
Controversy helped Exodus sell when Uris was accused of libel for his depictions of Dr Wladislav Dering, whom the author identified as a war criminal. In 1964, a London court ruled in favour of Dering, but awarded him minimal damages and made him pay court costs.
After Exodus, Uris traveled throughout Eastern Europe interviewing Holocaust survivors for Mila 18. Critics did not care for the novel (they didn’t care for most of his books) but Uris would call it his proudest achievement, ”the one thing I wrote
not caring if it sold 10 copies or 10 000. I simply had to tell a story.”
More controversy came with Topaz, a 1967 espionage story involving the French government. Uris’ principal source was Phillipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, an exiled French diplomat who later sued him for allegedly reneging on a profit-sharing agreement.
The author married three times. Survivors include five children and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete. – Sapa-AP