Exodus - Leon Uris [342]
“Before we go in, Kitty, I must ten you something. I must tell you I never loved Dafna as I love you. You know what kind of a life you must share with me.”
“I know, Ari.”
“I am not like other men ... it may be years ... it may be forever before I can ever again say that my need for you comes first, before all other things ... before the needs of this country. Will you be able to understand that?”
“I will understand, always.”
Everyone entered the dining room. The men put on skull caps.
Dov and Jordana and Ari and Kitty and Sutherland and Sarah. Their hearts were bursting with sorrow. As Ari walked toward the head of the table to take Barak’s place, Sutherland touched his arm.
“If you would not be offended,” Sutherland said, “I am the oldest male Jew present. May I tell the Seder?”
“We would be honored,” Ari said.
Sutherland walked to the head of the table, to the place of the head of the family. Everyone sat down and opened his copy of the Haggadah. Sutherland nodded to Dov Landau to begin.
Dov cleared his throat and read. “Why is this night different from all other nights of the year?
“This night is different because we celebrate the most important moment in the history of our people. On this night we celebrate their going forth in triumph from slavery into freedom.”
A Biography of Leon Uris
Leon Uris (1924–2003) was an author of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays who wrote over a dozen books including numerous bestselling novels. His epic Exodus (1958) has been translated into over fifty languages. Uris’s work is notable for its focus on dramatic moments in contemporary history, including World War II and its aftermath, the birth of modern Israel, and the Cold War. Through the massive popularity of his novels and his skill as a storyteller, Uris has had enormous influence on popular understanding of twentieth-century history.
Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the son of Jewish parents of recent Polish-Russian origin. As a child, Uris lived a transient and hardscrabble life. He attended schools in Baltimore, Virginia, and Philadelphia while his father worked as an unsuccessful storekeeper. Even though he was a below-average student, Uris excelled in history and was fascinated by literature; he made up his mind to be a writer at a young age.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Uris dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a radio operator in the South Pacific, and after the war he settled down in San Francisco with his first wife, Betty. He began working for local papers and wrote fiction on the side. His first novel, Battle Cry, was published in 1953 and drew on his experience as a marine. When the book’s film rights were picked up, Uris moved to Hollywood to help with the screenplay, and he stayed to work on other film scripts, including the highly successful Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957.
Uris’s second novel, The Angry Hills (1955), is set in Greece but contains plot points that center on Jewish emigration to the territories that would eventually become Israel. The history that led to Israel’s earliest days is also the subject of Uris’s most commercially successful novel, Exodus. Not long after Israel first achieved statehood, Uris began researching the novel, traveling 12,000 miles within the country itself, interviewing over 1,200 residents, and reading hundreds of texts on Jewish history. The book would go on to sell more copies than Gone with the Wind.
Uris’s dedication to research became the foundation of many of his subsequent novels and nonfiction books. Mila 18 (1961) chronicles Jewish resistance in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghettos, and Armageddon (1964) details the years of the Berlin airlift. Topaz (1967) explores French-American intrigue at the height of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, while The Haj (1984) continues Uris’s look into Middle Eastern history. Much of Uris’s fiction also draws explicitly from his own travels and experiences: QB VII (1970) is a courtroom drama based on a libel