EXODUS: Novel or Propaganda Piece?

NOTE: I published a shorter version of this essay in Quillette in September of 2023.

Sixty-five years ago this month Doubleday and Company published – unleashed might be a more accurate word – Leon Uris’s novel, Exodus, a fictionalized account of the founding of the modern state of Israel. The novel, Uris’s third, was an instant hit and quickly became the bestselling American novel since Gone With the Wind, which had been published twenty-two years earlier. Exodus went on to become the bestselling novel of 1959, topping a list that included Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and the first unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Also among the ten bestsellers of 1959 were Allen Drury’s Advice and Consent, which would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and be adapted as both a hit Broadway play and Hollywood film, James Michener’s Hawaii, which also became a hit film, and William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American, which would soon become a sort of unofficial bible of the John F. Kennedy administration.

According to 80 Years of Bestsellers: 1895-1975, a reference book compiled by Alice Payne Hackett and James Henry Burke, by 1975 Exodus had sold a total of 5,473,710 copies in all formats (hardback, paperback, book club, etc.) in the U.S. alone. When you take into account the library copies that were borrowed, as well as the used copies that were sold or swapped, the novel had probably been read by at least ten million Americans by 1975, despite having been published when the population of the U.S. was about half its current size. The book was translated into dozens of languages and foreign sales accounted for millions more copies coming into print. By 1975, Exodus had more copies in print in the U.S. than many a perennial bestseller, including The Cat in the Hat, Lolita, The Diary of a Young Girl, Rosemary’s Baby, Thunderball, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Good Earth, and From Here to Eternity. The book has never gone out of print and remains relatively popular. On Amazon it has garnered nearly four thousand reader reviews, the vast majority of them favorable. At Goodreads.com the book has been rated by nearly 100,000 users (about thirty thousand more than Portnoy’s Complaint), and has a cumulative score of 4.34 stars out of a possible five (well above Portnoy’s 3.70).

From the beginning, however, the book was highly controversial. Uris, an American Jew born in Baltimore in 1924 (and pictured above), deliberately set out to give Americans a tale that would sentimentally mythologize modern Israel in much the same way that Gone With the Wind had sentimentally mythologized the Confederacy. His Jewish characters tended to be larger-than-life heroes. His Arabs were mostly dirty, lazy, dishonest, or homicidal, and sometimes all four. Although the story opens in Cyprus, in 1946, numerous flashbacks provide the reader with hideous scenes of pogroms in Russia and death camps in Germany and Poland. Curiously, though, Uris chose as his primary villains not Arabs, Russians, nor Nazis, but the British. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin comes in for particularly harsh treatment (the novel mixes real-life persons such as Bevin with plenty of fictional characters). Much of this is fair. In 1917, via the so-called Balfour Declaration, the British government had come out in support of a Jewish state in Palestine. But when, after World War II, large numbers of Jewish refugees fled Europe for Palestine, they found their efforts stymied by the British military. Thousands of them were held in concentration camps (but not death camps) operated by the British in Cyprus, over the objections of the U.S.A., France, and many other British allies. The reasons for this are many and complex and still debated. But Uris simplifies the matter considerably. He argues that the British were eager for Middle Eastern oil and were thus unwilling to anger Arab leaders in the area by helping to establish a Jewish state. This, according to Uris, was in spite of the fact that many Arab leaders had supported Germany during World War II. As a result, the Jewish characters in Exodus tend to view the British with the hatred they might have directed at the Nazis just a few years earlier.

Undoubtedly the British government and military committed plenty of mistakes in the Middle East (the Suez Crises, for instance), but Uris tends to treat Britain’s every move as evidence of congenital anti-Semitism on the part of the Brits. He does throw a sop every now and then to Arab and British readers. One of his major British characters turns out to be of Jewish heritage (though he hides this fact) and secretly supports the idea of an Israeli state. Likewise, a couple of Uris’s Arab characters turn out to be humane and reasonable individuals, but Uris treats them as exceptions that prove the rule: Arabs are dastardly and cannot be trusted. At one point, Uris praises Islamic culture, but it is the Islamic culture of bygone centuries. He writes:

“In some Arab lands the Jews were treated with a measure of fairness and near equality. Of course, no Jew could be entirely equal to a Moslem. A thousand years before, when Islam swept the world, Jews had been among the most honored of the Arab citizens. They were court doctors, the philosophers, and the artisans – the top of the Arab society. In the demise of the Arab world that followed the Mongol wars, the demise of the Jews was worse.”

But kind words about Arabs and Brits are hard to find in Exodus. Even while World War II is raging, many of the novel’s Zionists have to be convinced that, between the Brits and the Nazis, the Brits are the lesser of the two evils. In part this is because of the famous White Paper of 1939. This was a complex document that attempted to clarify the British government’s stance on a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But Uris treats it as simply a renunciation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In his typically breathless fashion, he writes:

“Whitehall and Chatham House and Neville Chamberlain, their Prime Minister and renowned appeaser, shocked the world with their pronouncement. The British Government issued a White Paper on the eve of World War II shutting off immigration to the frantic German Jews and stopping Jewish land buying [in Palestine]. The appeasers of Munich who had sold Spain and Czechoslovakia down the river had done the same to the Jews of Palestine…The Yishuv [a quasi-governmental body of Palestinian Jews] was rocked by the White Paper, the most staggering single blow they had ever received. On the eve of war, the British were sealing in the German Jews.”

Uris uses the phrase “sold down the river” several times, suggesting that he conceived of Exodus as being more in the mode of Uncle Tom’s Cabin than Gone With the Wind.

When trying to talk a fellow Jew into fighting alongside the British, the character named Akiva expends more vitriol on the British and Arabs than on the Nazis: “Even as the British blockade our coast against desperate people…even as the British create a ghetto inside their army with our boys…even as they have sold us out with the White Paper…even as the Yishuv puts its heart and soul into the war while the Arabs sit like vultures waiting to pounce…even with all this the British are the lesser of our enemies and we must fight with them.” (All the ellipses are Uris’s.)

When the book was first published, it was widely praised by many Israelis, as well as by many Americans, both Jew and Gentile alike. Critics more sympathetic to Britain and to the Arab nations found it wanting. Nowadays, the book is denounced even by many Israelis. On the occasion of the novel’s 55^th anniversary, in the fall of 2013, a writer for The Open University of Israel Magazine wrote:

“Erase just about whatever you remember from the Leon Uris book Exodus and the eponymous movie made by Otto Preminger with handsome Paul Newman as the hero. Just about none of it is true. Sure, there was a boat by the name [of Exodus], and yes there were Jewish refugees aboard it, who eventually made their way to Palestine, but the rest has little to do with historical facts.”

(Exodus, the novel, is a sweeping epic about all aspects of the birth of modern Israel. Otto Preminger’s film focuses almost exclusively on one part of the novel, a fictional retelling of the story of the immigrant ship christened Exodus 1947. People who know the story only through the film, which seems to be the case with the above magazine writer, often mistakenly assert that the novel is primarily a tale of the immigrant ship, which is not the case. The immigrant voyages – there are several of them in the novel – account for only about a fifth of Uris’s tale.)

Historians disagree on the matter of which real-life Israeli the hero of the novel, Ari Ben Canaan (played by Newman in the film), was based upon. Some say the model was Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan. Some say it was Israeli paramilitary soldier Yehuda Arazi. Some say it was Israeli intelligence officer Yossi Harel. Writing for The Guardian in 2007, journalist Linda Grant put forth another possible model, a man who had no regard for Uris’s skills as a historian:

“He is 83-year-old Ike Aronowitz, former captain of the illegal immigrant ship Exodus. Who would recognise him? He is known to the world in an entirely different incarnation: as the blond, blue-eyed Paul Newman, who played Aronowitz in Otto Preminger's 1960 film Exodus, based on Leon Uris's blockbuster novel of the same name.

“Both film and book tell the story of the postwar illegal immigration ships bearing a human cargo of Holocaust survivors who tried to break the British blockade of Palestine in the last days of the Mandate. It was an incident that would become part of the founding mythology of Israel, legendary because the fictionalised account came to symbolise the birth of a nation and generated international sympathy and support. But it was a fairy tale. In Uris's version, the Jewish refugees, stranded on Cyprus, are saved by a sympathetic British general who convinces the British government to allow the ship to land. In real life, the British army boarded, killed three people, loaded the passengers on to prison ships and took them back to Hamburg. When Uris was researching his novel in 1956, he interviewed Aronowitz, who was unimpressed by his credentials: ‘I told him: you're a great writer of bestsellers, but for history you're the wrong guy. He was very offended.’"

A fuller interview with Aronowitz, which appeared in the Jerusalem Post, included this exchange with journalist Ruthie Blum Liebowitz”

Did Leon Uris interview you prior to writing the book for the details you remember? Yes he did, in 1956. What emerged from that interview? I told him that he was a very gifted writer, but not a historian, and therefore it shouldn't be he writing the history of the Exodus. How did he react when you said that? He was very offended. But, of course, I turned out to be right, because afterwards, he wrote a very good novel, but it had nothing to do with reality. Exodus, shmexodus. Was it completely inaccurate? I'm telling you, it had nothing to do with reality - not because of my own story, but because of the situation as a whole.

Factual or not, Exodus was clearly conceived as a work of pro-Israel agitprop. And on that level, it was wildly successful. According to Wikipedia:

“Whatever the genesis of the work, it initiated a new sympathy for the newly established State of Israel. The book has been widely praised as successful propaganda for Israel. Uris acknowledged writing from a pro-Israel perspective after the book's publication, stating that: ‘I set out to tell a story of Israel. I am definitely biased. I am definitely pro-Jewish,’ and the then–Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion remarked that: ‘as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.’”

But the book is also wildly inaccurate and even inflammatory at times. Consider, for instance, what Uris writes about The SS Patria, another immigrant ship bound for Palestine:

“Two battered steamers reached Palestine with two thousand refugees and the British quickly ordered them transferred to the Patria for exile to Mauritius, an island east of Africa. The Patria sank off Palestine’s shores in sight of Haifa, and hundreds of refugees drowned.”

In fact, the SS Patria was sunk by members of Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization, who planted a bomb in the ship’s hull and then detonated it. The ship sank with 1,800 mostly Jewish refugees aboard. Of that number, 267 were killed and another 172 injured. Here’s Wikipedia again:

“The Haganah claims to have miscalculated the effects of the explosion. The bomb blew the steel frame off one full side of the ship and the ship sank in less than 16 minutes, trapping hundreds in the hold. The British allowed the survivors to remain in Palestine on humanitarian grounds. Who was responsible and the true reason why Patria sank remained controversial mysteries until 1957, when Munya Mardor, the person who planted the bomb, published a book about his experiences.”

Thus, a full year before the publication of Exodus, it had been revealed that Zionists in Palestine, not the British, were responsible for the sinking of the Patria.

Even worse is Uris’s retelling of the 1946 terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The bombing was carried out by members of Irgun, another Zionist paramilitary organization, which Uris for some reason chose to rename the Maccabees. The Irgun was a more radical paramilitary group that had broken away from the Haganah. Irgun’s leader at the time was Menachem Begin, who would later become Israel’s sixth Prime Minister. Here’s all Uris has to say about the bombing:

“Finally, the British Foreign Minister burst forth with an anti-Jewish tirade and proclaimed all further immigration stopped. The answer to this came from the Maccabees. The British had their main headquarters in the right wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem…A dozen Maccabees, dressed as Arabs, delivered several dozen enormous milk cans to the basement of the hotel. The milk cans were placed under the right wing of the hotel beneath British headquarters. The cans were filled with dynamite. They set the timing devices, cleared the area, and phoned the British a warning to get out of the building. The British scoffed at the idea. This time the Maccabees were playing a prank. They merely wanted to make fools of the British. Surely they would not dare attack British headquarters!

“In a few minutes there was a blast heard across the breadth of Palestine. The right wing of the King David Hotel was blown to smithereens!”

That is where Uris’s account ends. He doesn’t mention that the attack murdered 91 people and injured 46. Almost all of the dead were hotel workers or British clerical workers – typists, messengers, etc. Forty-one of the dead were Arabs, mostly hotel employees. Twenty-eight were British, mostly government workers. The blast also killed seventeen Jews, mostly innocent hotel visitors or workers. Although Menachem Begin and other members of Irgun always insisted that the British were given a warning twenty-five minutes in advance of the explosion, these warnings were not issued to anyone in authority. In any case, five of the dead were bystanders outside the building. The warnings wouldn’t have done them any good. Wikipedia notes that, “The blast threw the Postmaster General from the hotel across the street onto a wall of the YMCA opposite, from where his remains had to be scraped.”

Throughout the novel, Uris puts the most positive possible spin on the actions of the Zionists, while portraying any sort of pushback from the British or the Arabs as acts of terror. This is unfortunate, because, along with all the mis- and dis-information contained in the novel, it also contains a great deal of relatively uncontroversial history. He provides moving accounts of the suffering of Jews during the Russian pogroms of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. He delivers harrowing accounts of life inside a Nazi concentration camp. But then he reports that, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews of Denmark to wear a yellow star identifying them as Jews, brave King Christian X of Denmark chose to wear a star himself, in solidarity with his Jewish countrymen. Uris didn’t invent this lie, but he seems happy to repeat it, if only to make the British look like cowards in comparison with the Danes. Christian did, indeed, show courage in defending his country’s Jews against the Nazis, but he never wore the yellow star.

One person who took serious offense at the way Uris played with the truth was a Polish doctor named Wladislaw Dering. In the original edition of the book, Uris credited Dering with having performed 17,000 unnecessary sterilization surgeries on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz. Dering, though not a Jew, was himself a prisoner at Auschwitz. He had been a member of a Polish resistance group that was fighting the Nazis when he was captured and sent to Auschwitz in 1942. After the war, Dering was detained by the British as a possible war criminal. But he was eventually released, after which he returned to the practice of medicine. He didn’t discover that he was mentioned in Exodus until 1964, but when he did he took immediate legal action against Uris, suing him for libel in Great Britain. The trial became a media sensation and dragged on for nineteen days, during which many former prisoners at Auschwitz testified both for and against the doctor. As it turned out, surgical operations were carefully recorded in a logbook at Auschwitz, and that logbook had somehow managed to survive the war. Eventually it was established that the doctor had performed 130 unnecessary sterilization operations on both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, often using little or no anesthesia. Dering then claimed that the Nazis would have killed him had he not performed these surgeries, but other doctors who had been imprisoned at Auschwitz testified that they had refused to perform unnecessary surgeries and had not been seriously punished for their decision. Indeed, Dering had been rewarded with special privileges for performing unnecessary surgeries on his fellow prisoners. In the end, the court sided with Dering, but awarded him only a halfpenny in damages and ordered him to pay £20,000 in court costs, an amount equal to about half a million dollars today if adjusted for inflation. The verdict was an acknowledgement that Uris had wildly inflated the number of unnecessary surgeries, but the miniscule damage amount, and the fact that Dering was forced to pay both his own and Uris’s court costs, signaled to the general public that Dering had, indeed, done the Nazis’ bidding at Auschwitz, and been well rewarded for it. After the trial, his reputation was in tatters and his finances were ruined. Ironically, Dering was misidentified in the first edition of Exodus as Dr. Wladislaw Dehring. Dering believed that Uris had intentionally added the “h” to his surname to make it sound more German. Because of the lawsuit, Uris’s publisher eliminated any reference to the number of sterilizations Dering had performed, but otherwise let the accusation against him stand. The publisher also corrected the spelling of the doctor’s name, so that in every subsequent edition of the book, Dering has been identified accurately, which must have further rankled the penniless physician.

The case, known as Dering v. Uris, was so sensational – some called it the first war crimes trial of World War II to be held in a British courtroom – that Uris wrote a fictional account of it a few years later, called QBVII, for the courtroom in which the case was tried (Queen’s Bench Seven). Published in 1970, QBVII became the sixth bestselling book in America that year and was later adapted into a hit TV miniseries, starring Anthony Hopkins as the Dering character.

Though Uris freely spread a lot of misinformation during his career as a novelist, he has also been the victim of misinformation, some of it apparently motivated by anti-Semitism. In 2010, Rashid Khalidi, a Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, told an audience at the Brooklyn Law School that Exodus had been conceived by a Jewish ad executive in New York City who had been hired to promote the interests of Israel in the United States. “This carefully crafted propaganda was the work of seasoned professionals,” Khalidi claimed. “People like someone you probably never heard of, a man named Edward Gottlieb, for example. He’s one of the founders of the modern public relations industry. There are books about him as a great advertiser. In order to sell the great Israeli state to the American public many, many decades ago, Gottlieb commissioned a successful, young novelist. A man who was a committed Zionist, a fellow with the name of Leon Uris.”

A few weeks later, Khalidi told an audience at the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., “Given that many of the basic ideas about Palestine and Israel held by generations of Americans find their origin either in this trite novel or the equally clichéd movie, Gottlieb’s inspiration to send Leon Uris to Israel may have constituted one of the greatest advertising triumphs of the twentieth century.”

Khalidi didn’t invent this canard about the origins of Exodus. The claim had appeared in at least three anti-Israel books published in the 1990s. But in his 2016 book, The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East, journalist Martin Kramer thoroughly discredits the story of Edward Gottlieb’s involvement with Exodus, noting: “In sum, the Gottlieb ‘commission’ never happened. Uris’s biographers dismiss it, Gottlieb’s most knowledgeable associate denies it, and no documents in Uris’s papers or Israeli archives testify to it. Yet it persists in the echo chamber of anti-Israel literature, where it has been copied over and over. In Kathleen Christison’s book, it finally appeared under the imprimatur of a university press (California). In Khalidi’s lectures, it acquired a baroque elaboration, in which Edward Gottlieb emerges as ‘the father of the American iteration of Zionism’…

What is the myth’s appeal? Why is the truth about the genesis of Exodus so difficult to grasp? Why should Khalidi think the Gottlieb story is, in his coy phrase, “worth noting”? Because if you believe in Zionist mind-control, you must always assume the existence of a secret mover who (as Khalidi said) ‘you probably never heard of’ and who must be a professional expert in deception. This ‘seasoned’ salesman conceives of Exodus as a ‘gambit’ (Khalidi) or a ‘scheme’ (Christison). There is no studio or publisher’s advance, only a ‘commission,’ which qualifies the book as ‘propaganda—an ‘advertising triumph.’ In Khalidi’s Brooklyn Law School talk, he added that ‘the process of selling Israel didn’t stop with Gottlieb. . . . It has continued unabated since then.’ It was Khalidi’s purpose to cast Exodus, like the case for Israel itself, as a ‘carefully crafted’ sales job by Madison Avenue ‘madmen.’ Through their mediation, Israel has hoodwinked America.”

Curiously, the Edward Gottlieb fiction seems to have inspired the sixth episode of the classic TV series Mad Men. In that episode, titled “Babylon,” representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism visit the fictional advertising firm of Sterling Cooper to offer ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his associates a chance to compete for their business. Don’s boss (played by John Slattery) introduces one of the Israelis as “Urine Ben Shulhai.” Shulhai tells Draper that his name is pronounced “Yoram.” Another one of the Israelis hands Draper a hardback copy of Exodus. She tells him that it has been on the bestseller list for two years and is soon to be a major motion picture. “America has a love affair with Israel,” she adds, suggesting that Exodus is at least partially responsible for it. Draper thanks her for the book and tells her, jokingly, that the only book he owns about the Middle East is the Bible. He spends much of the episode wrestling with Uris’s novel, reading it in bed at night and discussing it with his gorgeous wife lying next to him. When she asks him if he likes it, he tells her, “I thought it would have more action.” Later, during a brainstorming session with his ad team, he asks them how Israel can attract more American tourists. And then, a second later, he answers his own question: “Maybe they should stop blowing up hotels.” It is never stated outright that a New York ad man might have had anything to do with the genesis of Exodus, but creator Matthew Weiner and his team seem to have at least been aware of the rumors and were riffing on them.

Exodus was published in the U.S. in September of 1958, one month after my own debut/birth. In a sense, I grew up with Exodus. Paperback copies were ubiquitous in the houses of the, mostly Catholic, friends and acquaintances I grew up with. It was one of those pop fictions, like The Godfather and The Exorcist, that every American home seemed to have a battered paperback copy of back in the day. My own home was no exception to this rule. My mother was an avid fan of popular fiction, and the home I grew up in had copies of not only Exodus but also QBVII and Trinity and possibly even a few other Uris novels that I’ve forgotten about. But not until earlier this year, as the book and I were approaching our sixty-fifth birthdays, did I finally get around to reading it. Unlike Don Draper, I found the book to have quite a bit of action and adventure. Like most literary critics, I found Uris’s writing to be hackneyed but that isn’t a deal-breaker for me. If a story is sufficiently thrilling, I’m willing to put up with some subpar prose. I came to the book knowing too much about its reputation as a racist, error-filled screed to be able to read it with an open mind, the way most of its original readers probably did. I can’t say that I loved the book. I found some long stretches of it extremely tedious. My favorite parts were the back stories, wherein Uris, after introducing us to a character in the year 1946, goes back and tells us all about how he or she happened to find themselves caught up in the birth of modern Israel. I’m glad I read it but it isn’t a book I plan to recommend to anyone. Many younger readers would probably find it confusing. For one thing, Uris regularly refers to his Jews simply as Palestinians, pretending that when these pilgrims arrived at Palestine, it was largely empty, populated mainly by a few nomadic Arabs and others with no great attachment to the land. Another thing likely to confuse younger readers is the outsized vitriol targeted at the British so shortly after the Brits and the Yanks had defeated the Nazis and freed the prisoners that remained in their death camps.

Nonetheless, Exodus has reached the age of sixty-five and, judging from the enthusiasm for it at online sites like Amazon and Goodreads, appears to still have a lot of life ahead of it. I wish I could say the same for myself.

Leon Uris had a lot of professional success in his lifetime, but his personal life was a bit of a train wreck. In 1968, after divorcing his first wife, Uris married the much younger Margery Edwards (pictured above). Curiously, photographs of Ms. Edwards show her to have borne a strong resemblance to Megan Calvet, the second wife of Don Draper (played by Canadian actress Jessica Paré). A few months after marrying Uris, Margery died under mysterious circumstances, near their home in Aspen, Colorado. Several newspapers called it an apparent suicide, and the Aspen Police Department eventually concurred. In 2016, thirteen years after his father’s death, Michael Cady Uris published a memoir called The Uris Trinity, in which he claims that he and his future stepmother became sexually involved when he was fifteen and she was twenty-four. The relationship continued even after Margery and Leon married. According to the memoir, Leon found out about the affair and confronted his wife one snowy night in Aspen outside their secluded mountain home. Prior to confronting Margery, Leon had given Michael a beer laced with sleeping powder. Michael sussed out that his father was up to something and only pretended to consume the beer. Later, when he heard his father screaming at Margery out in front of the house, Michael grabbed a loaded pistol and went out to protect his lover/stepmother. The encounter grew even more hostile when Michael joined it and Leon began physically attacking Michael. Michael claims to have drawn his gun but Leon easily disarmed him and tossed the weapon aside. While the two men fought physically, Margery grabbed the gun and ran back to the house. Freeing himself from his father’s grasp, Michael pursued her. He and she wrestled over the gun for a short time, firing off one or, possibly, two shots. Afraid he might accidentally kill her if he continued to struggle with her, Michael let go of the gun, whereupon Margery put it in her mouth and pulled the trigger, killing herself. Eventually, Leon arrived at the scene and staged the matter to make it look as if his wife had run off into the woods behind the house and committed suicide in solitude. Michael stuck to that story for 47 years.

It might well have happened that way, but the scene in Michael’s memoir is filled with dialog so melodramatic it might have come from one of Leon’s books. Here’s an example: “Look at yourself, the grand manipulator and I am your crowning achievement. I enjoy being Frankenstein’s monster. That’s the only way I could get an audience with the good doctor. All I ever wanted was to be in your good graces; whatever happened between Margery and me was not part of my plan. But your grand design collapsed. You lost control of me, your wife, and of yourself. You’ve had your failures, Dad, accept it. I’m one of them.”

Shortly there after, Leon tells Michael: “Nicely played, Son. Maybe I taught you too well. No matter how much you fight it, you’ll never be a model citizen. You’ll never be like your brother. You are my black rose.”

Michael notes that, “Even under such stress, in the snow, in the dark, my father could write his dialog and hurl the crippling words like weapons.” Somehow, I doubt it. Michael writes believably about his love for Margery and about what an overbearing brute his father could be. I don’t doubt that he had an affair with his stepmother. And I don’t doubt that she killed herself when it appeared she was going to lose both her marriage and her young lover in a nasty divorce action. But the drug-laced beer and the three-way confrontation on a dark and stormy night sounds like it was written with a Hollywood film sale in mind.

A year or so after Margery’s death, Leon Uris got married for the third and last time, to photographer Jill Peabody. Like Margery, Jill was about half Leon’s age. The union ended in divorce eighteen years later. Although his personal life was filled with messy failures, Uris’s professional life included many noteworthy successes. And Exodus was the biggest of them all.