Sunday, July 6, 2003		Books

Remembering...
Leon Uris: The author of ‘near history’
Randeep Wadehra

EXODUS (1958) made him famous. But he began his life on a none-too-promising note. Marital unhappiness, too, dogged him perennially. Leon Uris was born on August 3, 1924, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Wolf William Uris, was a Polish immigrant and in Uris’ words a failure. His mother, Anna Blumberg Uris, was a first-generation American. He married Betty Beck, a US Marine Sergeant, in 1945. They divorced in 1965. He married Margery Edwards in 1968, but this relationship ended in tragedy when she died of suspected suicide within a year. In 1970 Uris married Jill Peabody who was a photographer and had collaborated with him in writing two books, viz., A Terrible Beauty (1975) and Jerusalem: Song of Songs (1981). They had two children, but divorced in 1989. He died of renal failure on June 21, 2003, in his home on the Shelter Island, New York. He was 78.

He dropped out of high school in 1942 and enlisted with the United States Marine Corps as a field radio operator. During World War II he saw action in Japan and New Zealand. But soon he fell sick owing to malaria and was discharged in 1946. He began his second career as a freelance writer in 1950. Some would say that this was inevitable, as writing was Leon Uris’ first love during his childhood. However, the fact that his teacher failed him thrice in English did not indicate at that time that one day he would be known as the author of ‘near-histories’. Gradually he went on to write novels that clearly showed that his stint with the Marines had left a deep impression on his worldview. His very first novel Battle Cry is proof enough. His dozen novels and other works reflect his penchant for painstaking research. It is said that for Exodus he had travelled a distance of 12,000 miles (50,000 miles according to another estimate), interviewed more than 1200 people and read 300 books! No wonder his magnum opus became so popular during its time that it was translated into 50 languages and officially sold more than 5 million copies.

In 1955 The Angry Hills could not attract as much notice as his debut novel did. But Exodus caught the public’s imagination because it depicted the heroic struggle by the various characters in establishing and defending the Israel. However, Leon’s fans could not have missed the paradox in the narrative. While showing Jews as victims of European racism, the author invariably depicts the Arabs as slothful hypocrites who lust after white Jewish women while keeping theirs in wraps. They do not put in honest labour and are generally sub-human in every sense of the term. Many consider it a classic case of propaganda presented as an epic. Another criticism is more literary. His dialogues are considered unnatural, the prose often stilted and the narrative ‘pulpy’. Yet characters like Ari, Kitty Freemont, Karen, Mark Parker and Dov Landau etc come alive in the novel.

Exodus Revisited (1960) and Mila 18 (1961) could not match Exodus in popularity. However, Mila 18 became famous for having forced Joseph Heller to change his World War II novel’s title from Catch 18 to Catch 22. In 1967 Topaz — a spy thriller — is said to have caused a storm within the French government as it was suspected to be based on intelligence papers leaked by an anti-DeGaulle French diplomat. In 1970 Uris came up with a courtroom drama Q.B. VII (Queen’s Bench Seven), wherein an author, Abraham Cody, stands trial in England for libel. The evidence against him is a book he wrote detailing his family’s extermination at a concentration camp and naming the prominent Sir Adam Kelms as one of the sadistic doctors who committed horrible atrocities there. This plot is based on Uris’s real life experience when a doctor sued him and his publisher for damages.

In Trinity (1976), he gives an account of a North Irish family’s travails in the late 19^th century. This saga is continued in The Redemption (1995). The Haj (1984) is about Palestinians’ story beginning with World War I and ending with the 1956 Suez War. Even though he tried to give the Arab perspective to the narrative he only succeeded in attracting hostility from Arab extremist groups. Along with the Russian pogroms, the Arab-Israeli conflict provides background to the narrative of another of his novels, Mitla Pass. His other notable works include A God in Ruins (1999). His latest work O’Hara’s Choice is reportedly about the American Marine Corps and is scheduled for release in October 2003. One is sure that Leon Uris fans will grab this one, if only because it would be the writer’s last published work.