What could be better than reading ‘Exodus’ while in Israel and seeing and experiencing the sites of the historic creation of the new state and the events that surrounded it?  I first read ‘Exodus’ as a young teen-ager, perhaps even when it was first published when I was 13, and in re-reading it, I became aware of its profound influence on me, an influence that was to leave me with an existential horror of the Holocaust, a profound love for the Jewish homeland, and a deep inner sense of vulnerability that has remained with me all these years.

Re-reading this nearly 700 page novel while we traveled from Akko and Golan in the north to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and then on to the Negev, brought back memories, anguish, hope, and pride, especially at this moment when Israel is struggling with what might be the biggest threat to its existence since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a threat that comes not from the combined armies of the Arab neighbors promising to ‘kill the Jews’ but from its own internal contradictions—the Ultra-Orthodox vs the secular, the high-tech glass and steel towers of Tel Aviv vs the wind-swept sands of the settlements in Greater Judea and Samaria, the progressive agenda vs the Right, and on and on.

But back to the book with its memorable characters—Ari Ben Canaan, Kitty Fremont, Karen Hansen, Dov Landau, and many others.  Uris appears to have struggled mightily with his two somewhat imcompatible goals—thrill the reader with quickly sketched two dimensional characters who are larger than life and overcome impossible odds in action-packed situations while at the same time providing the reader with deep historical background and contemporary facts on the ground.  He only partially succeeds in balancing these two often contradictory goals distracting the reader from the plight of the eponymous boat prevented from leaving Cyprus by the largely evil and stupid Brits with flashbacks providing the details of the main characters lives and how they came to be on the Exodus.

A 700 page novel deserves a longer review, but thinking about the 75 years of Israeli statehood, the current political crisis there, and Ari and Kitty’s continuous failure to get it together has exhausted me.  The book has its place but many will find it a bit outdated in its style and a bit naive in its characters.  I loved returning to this piece of my early history.