66 pages • 2 hours read
Leon UrisExodus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Resilience and Survival in the Face of Adversity
Throughout Exodus, the characters face adversities on every side, and yet the novel is a story of resilience and survival in the midst of all those challenges. This is true in almost every historical and geographical context addressed by the book. During the late 1800s, the narrative follows two young refugees expelled from the Pale by violent pogroms. In the early 20th century, it focuses on the adversities facing the small Jewish settlements in Palestine, which face not only resistance from their immediate neighbors but also governmental repression and the difficulties of producing arable land from swamps and deserts.
As Ari describes the condition of life at home in Palestine, “Every year we come to a crisis which is sure to wipe us out—then we go on to another crisis worse than the last” (25). During the World War II years, the novel follows children affected by the Holocaust—one, a refugee who must leave her family behind (Karen), and another, who faces the violence of the ghetto, the extermination of his family, and a life of perpetual trauma in Auschwitz (Dov). Even after the war is over, the novel’s characters still face major challenges: First as refugees imprisoned in British encampments, and then as settlers who must contend with Arab and British hostilities in Palestine.
The novel’s staggered narrative, interspersed with frequent flashbacks, reinforces the sense that Jewish history strikes a pattern of one wave of adversity after another, out of which only a handful of survivors press on. Despite their losses, the emphasis is on the fact that they continue going forward, never content to give up in the face of antisemitism or to accept the prospect of a life without a homeland.
Some parts of the novel strike a triumphalist tone, emphasizing the Jewish people’s perpetual overcoming of these adversities, but to call it a novel about permanently overcoming adversity would be to drive the characterization too far. Even in the moments of their greatest triumph, as after their victory in the 1948 war, the Jewish people still suffer tragedy and heartbreak at every turn (as seen, for example, in Karen’s murder). The novel ends not on a note of triumph, but with Ari’s desperate cries of grief: “God! God! Why don’t they let us alone! Why don’t they let us live!” (624). The novel’s theme, then, is better characterized as resilience and survival, not as overcoming adversity or the triumph of Israel. Despite all the challenges the Jewish people face, they continue going forward, exhibiting resilience, though each success is marred with immense loss.
The Struggle for a Homeland
One of the central ideological principles behind the narrative of Exodus is the belief that Palestine is the original native homeland of the Jewish people, and that they deserve to have independence and sovereignty in their own land. When the Russian Jews Jossi and Yakov Rabinsky first set foot in Palestine, they regard it as their own: “We are home, Jossi! We are home!” (221). This principle of the land as an indigenous possession is not only given voice by many of the characters in the novel, but by the narrator as well, and thus it almost certainly expresses Leon Uris’s personal conviction on the matter.
The novel does not, however, devote the same level of attention to any corollary principle of an indigenous homeland in Palestine for the Palestinian Arabs who have lived there for centuries. The novel’s depiction of its Arab Palestinian characters has attracted controversy since its publication (See: Background), and Palestinian characters often appear only as antagonists, such as when an Arab village murders a Jewish teenager or when Kammal is murdered by his fellow Arabs for his friendly relations with Jews. The novel suggests that Palestinian Arabs had a legitimate chance for their own sovereign state in a partitioned Palestine, but turned away from that chance to perpetuate hostilities against the Israelis—a much-disputed claim in later decades.
In the case of the novel’s Jewish characters, Palestine operates as the long-sought homeland that they never found anywhere else in the world and as the fulfillment of ancient prophecies to bring them back to Eretz Israel (the land of Israel). Some groups, like the religious Jews represented by Barak Ben Canaan’s family of origin in the Pale, initially resist the idea of going back to Palestine because they think it is the prerogative of the future Messiah to orchestrate a return to the land. Others, like Karen Clement’s family in Germany, are broadly acculturated into their respective European countries: The Clements think of themselves first and foremost as Germans, not primarily as Jews. After the experience of decades of violence and hostility aimed at European Jews, however, these attitudes change. After the Holocaust, immigration to Israel rapidly increases.
This yearning for their homeland soon takes root in the nascent culture of Jewish Palestine: “The eternal longing of the Jewish people to own land is so great that is where our new heritage comes from” (356). The novel’s characters fight fiercely in the war of 1948, believing that they must defend their settlements at all costs. At the novel’s end, Karen’s murder suggests that the struggle is ongoing, but the characters remain committed to their new Israeli state.
The Moral Complexities of War and Political Struggle
Another major theme in the novel concerns the moral complexities of war and political struggle. Modern readers might assume that such a theme would be primarily concerned with the complexities in the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, but most of the book’s attention is focused elsewhere. Only with regard to Ari Ben Canaan’s relationship to the Arab village of Abu Yesha, near where he grew up, is there any complexity in the Jewish/Palestinian dynamic; for most of the novel’s length, Jewish action vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arabs is portrayed as a matter of necessary self-defense.
Most treatments of the theme, then, deal with other conflicts and geopolitical relationships, including Jewish/British interactions and internecine Jewish issues. The Jewish community wrestles with the complexity of having certain British officials as their closest allies, while the official British position toward the Jewish presence in Palestine is implicitly hostile. The British are the ones who give them the Balfour Declaration, which first gets the process started for a legitimate basis in international law for a Jewish state in Palestine. During the 1930s and ’40s, however, as the international power responsible for overseeing the Palestine Mandate, the British tries to restrict Jewish immigration even as the need for a refugee haven for European Jews reaches its highest point. The British themselves wrestle with the complexities of the situation, balancing the moral justice of helping the Jewish cause with the political necessity of maintaining peace and influence in an increasingly valuable Middle East: “Right and wrong? It is not for you and me to argue the right and wrong of the question. The only kingdom that runs on righteousness is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdoms of the earth run on oil” (32).
In order to navigate the difficult relationship with the British, Jewish characters use resistance to British rule and employ propaganda coups like the Exodus ruse to bring international pressure upon the British. This often involves thorny moral questions, such as the one posed in the Exodus ruse itself, as it involves putting children at risk and even encouraging children to undertake a hunger strike. As Zev Gilboa says during that episode, “I cannot stand by and watch children starve to death” (190). Such moral objections suggest that there may be limits to what is or is not acceptable in the quest for achieving a greater goal.
The moral complexities of war and political struggle are also a source of debate within the Jewish community itself. During the years of the Palestine Mandate, opposing philosophies arise between different Jewish groups, some of which counsel patience and passive resistance to British overreach, while others push for firmer action and for going on the offensive. These two philosophies are represented by the two brothers, Barak and Akiva, with the former hoping for a diplomatic solution and the latter organizing a violent resistance movement, leading to an estrangement between the two brothers. The fraught politics of Palestine thus create a situation where every position is one that carries enormous questions of justice, practicality, and possible violence, leading to competing visions for how to proceed.
