Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I read "Exodus" in high school. Israel was the "cool" country then: small, tough, self-reliant (with a few powerful friends) and just about everything they did was daring, neat and ground-breaking. I wanted to go join up. A year later I tried to but was headed for my own military. I started to teach myself Hebrew which quickly led by happenstance to learning Farsi and later Arabic. I learned Farsi quite well, Arabic enough to get by, but not Hebrew--yet.

"Exodus"--the book, and later the movie with Paul Newman who looked the part, but not as well as Omar Sharif did in Lawrence of Arabia and Eva Marie Saint who never really looked the part in any of her roles that I know about, could save the movie (even with the miserable theme song) if you had read the book. There was also Sal Mineo, poor guy. The book was meaningful to me on a couple of levels, but there's only one classic�"Exodus", and that took place in Egypt and the Sinai. The reason for the exodus that took place in the 40s was much more horrific, and Leon Uris' novel could not do it enough justice. Perhaps no movie or book ever could.

I read it back then because I saw one of my schoolmates reading it and I asked him if it was good, so we kind of read it simultaneously, checking with each other every couple of days or so. I realized much later that he was shocked that I had shown an interest in reading what he was reading and probably that I was reading books at all.