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10 Stars, if I Could!!!!

Much to my chagrin I have never read Leon Uris! Why I waited? I have no excuses to serve up. Uris writes BIG BOOKS that are quite spectacular. He is one of very few brilliant maestros in literature, in my opinion. He writes with an ease that kept me turning the 648 pages of this great masterpiece. His research into the facts of Palestine and the exoduses to her holy land is extensive and as factual as possible in pre-electronic 1958. His characters are so well developed that I felt each one was a member of my very own family. I cried and laughed with them. I felt their dreams and their pain and the blinding frustration as they followed their life long dream: Palestine! And certainly the British Empire would be their greatest friend, especially since they ratified the Palestine Mandate, right? Wrong. Why? Oil, of course. As the novel begins, the reader is introduced to the British duplicity. Caught on the Cyprus shoreline in British DP camps behind barbed wire are thousands of Jewish refugees waiting for transport to Ersatz-Israel after the conclusion of WW II. Foreign correspondent Mark Palmer and his childhood friend Kitty Fremont are reunited and enjoying the Cyprus sun after the long war in Europe. Since her husband and child’s death, Kitty has been on the Greek Island working as a nurse in various orphanages.

Ari Ben Canaan, a very handsome sabra asks Mark to stay and will hand him an exclusive. The Mossad agent is going to smuggle 300 children to Palestine right under the British noses! They are to sail on the Exodus in two weeks time. He also needs the services of Fremont, but she is adamant: no. Yes, you guessed it. She eventually does, but only after she meets a young girl named Karen in the camps and hears David Ben Ami’s tale of a “historical abortion.�� This tale begins in 1896 Russia and ends with the Rabinsky brothers in Ersatz-Israel many long and difficult years later.

We also learn Karen and Dov’s stories: the young Jewish girl who Ari squirreled out of Germany and into Denmark and the quiet bitter concentration camp survivor who is more at home in the dark dank sewers under a Polish Ghetto than in the light. We meet the sabras: Dagna, David, Eli, Jordana, and Ari. This first generation of Ersatz-Israel are strong and focused. They are Israel. They work hard without complaint to reclaim the “dead�� land and will fight to their death to see Palestine as the independent state of Israel. Death threatens on all sides, neither the Arabs nor the Brits want them there. The ship Exodus is both a symbol and a life dream. And Leon Uris’s EXODUS is the perfect vessel to tell their stories!