Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller (review)

Before his death in 2003, Leon Uris authored 13 novels, three Hollywood movie scripts (Battle Cry, 1954, The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957, and The Angry Hills, 1959), and a photographic history, accompanied with historical essays on Israel and Ireland. He will be best remembered, however, for his best-selling historical works of fiction, Battle Cry (1953), Exodus (1958), and Trinity (1976). An indefatigable researcher, Uris prided himself on his extensive research and interviews, which laid the groundwork for recreating, among other historical events the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Mila 18), the founding of Israel (Exodus), and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish history (Trinity).

Although not recognized among the top tier of American-Jewish writers, such as Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, Uris nevertheless has attained his place, along with Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok, amid the nation's best-selling novelists. Uris' most important work, Exodus, was not only among the most popular novels of its time, but it did more to instill a positive image of Israel in the mind of the American public than any work of history or fiction to this date. When Doubleday published Exodus, the former prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, noted its propaganda value as the most significant thing ever written about Israel.

Aside from Kathleen Shine Cain's Leon Uris: A Critical Companion (1998), however, there has not until now been a full-length critical study of Uris's life and work. This omission has been rectified with the publication of Ira Nadel's biography (which oddly omits Cain's work in its bibliography) of one of the last century's most important writers of popular fiction. Both the strength and weakness of Nadel's biography, however, lies with his access to the Leon Uris archive, housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and much information about his early life gleaned from his interviews with Uris's family. Although Nadel has made an important contribution to our understanding of his subject, he writes as if he were determined to provide the reader with every detail unearthed from his research, whether relevant or not. Nadel, for example, notes that an intruder was found dressed in Uris's bathrobe in his Colorado home (p. 236), but neglects to inform us of the relevance of this incident. This criticism aside, there is much to praise in Nadel's biography and he certainly succeeds in providing us with a great many insights about a writer whose novels challenged the stereotype of the effete Jew and promoted the image of the "tough Jew."

Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Wolf William Uris, a shopkeeper, and Anna Blumberg. Both parents were Jews of Russian Polish origin. His father, an immigrant from Poland, spent a year in Palestine after World War I and derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem." Uris, growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, was undersized as well as asthmatic and once said that "I used to think of myself as a sad little Jewish boy." Leon was brought up without any religious training, and because his father was a Communist, he forbade his son any preparation for becoming a Jew, including training for a bar-mitzvah (both his son and daughter through his third wife, Jill Peabody, received a bar and bat-mitzvah). Later in life, Uris, because of the Holocaust, embraced a part of Judaism because he wanted it as his moral standard for living.

Until his service in the U.S. Marines (the inspiration for his first best-seller, Battle Cry) Uris never strongly identified with Judaism or religion. As Nadel writes,

The history of the Jews meant something to him culturally, but not spiritually and certainly not personally. But the image of the "soft" Jew angered him and he was determined to replace it with one of strength. He undertook...