By Oliver B. Pollak
RICHMOND, California — A conversation over the breakfast table with friends started with the question, “What book do you wish you had not read so you could read it for the first time?”
We pushed the concept to include, what do you wish you had read that you have not read?, what do you wish you had not read?, what books have you reread?, and when you reread a book and it doesn’t suit your fancy, do you stop and question how you have changed? There can be long delays, even decades, before reading a particular book. Life’s chores, easier tasks and higher priorities delay leisure reading, creativity and confounding how to turn fiction into real life purposes. I conquered James Joyce’s Ulysses and got well into Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in my sixties. Some books, despite universal acclaim, may be impenetrable.
Exodus appeared in 1958, sixty years ago. A Book of the Month Club edition arrived at our home. It was on the New York Times bestseller list in 1959 between Anatomy of a Murder by John D. Voelker and Advise and Consent by Allen Drury, all three became movies directed by Otto Preminger. Everyone in my Los Angeles Jewish circle, probably AZA, was talking about Exodus. A book with a similar buzz was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle in 1968.
Nine hundred copies of Exodus were available on AbeBooks.com. Bank of Books in Ventura delivered a first edition with a dust jacket for $6.19. The book arrived with a delicious surprise, a quality of provenance not indicated in the online description, the fly leaf was embossed with a Library Initial Embosser.
Barbara J. Raio died at the age of 82, on December 24, 2014. She was married for 65 years to Fred Raio. Whether she purchased the embosser or received it as a gift, it indicates she cared about her books.
In the 1950s Captain Horatio Hornblower books by C. S. Forester captured my imagination. I put myself to sleep with swashbuckling heroic Napoleonic War escapades. I may have put myself to sleep with fantasy visions of naval encounters. The impact of Exodus on my impressionable teenage mind is incalculable. It ranks with reading Stalingrad in junior high school in the 8th or 9th grade, and Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer in high school.
I cannot distinguish whether my enduring recollection prior to rereading came from the book or the movie. My memory recalls Dov Landau, youthful survivor of Auschwitz, got killed serving the Irgun (Maccabees in the book). With thirty pages to finish the book Dov was still alive. It was Dov’s girlfriend Karen who was killed, Dov lives. What tricks memory plays, so unreliable.
Different readers and different times will leave different marginal notes. Besides marking the existence of libraries and bookstores in the state of Israel in the making I also underlined on page 498 where Uris wrote, the “Maccabees rolled barrel bombs down the slopes of Carmel into the Arab area…” According to Wikipedia this was “the earliest known use of barrel bombs.” In the contemporary ongoing war in Syria the government drops barrel bombs from helicopters.
Uris was born 1924 and died in 2003 at the age of 78. He was in his early 30s when he started Exodus in 1956. Others have reread Exodus. Alan Eisner author of the novel The Nazi Hunter (2007) wrote in the Huffington Post in 2013, “Re-reading Leon Uris’ Exodus.” He read it in 1970 when he was 16. On his second reading he wrote “The most disturbing facet of the book is Uris’ depiction of Arabs.” It was negative, derogatory, they were beyond redemption. In 2013 the need was “to win the peace rather that to prevail in war.” The imperatives of Judaism in 1947, 2007 and 2018 differed. I suspect a PEW report on Exodus readership would find a generational divide with few readers under 40.
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Pollak, an attorney and professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, is a San Diego Jewish World correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com