Leon Uris (100 page)
Sarah Ben Canaan stood at the door. “I know we are all broken,” she said pitifully, “but we should go on with the Seder.”
Kitty looked to Dov and the boy nodded.
They walked in tragic procession toward the dining room. Jordana stopped Kitty outside the door.
“Ari sits alone in the barn,” Jordana said. “Will you go to him?”
Kitty walked from the cottage. She saw the lights of the other houses of the
moshav
. The Seder had begun in them. At this very moment, fathers were telling their families the age-old story of the Exodus as it had always been told by fathers and would be told for eternities to come. It began to drizzle and Kitty walked faster, toward the flickering lantern light from the barn. She entered and looked around. Ari sat with his back to her on a bale of hay. She walked up behind him and touched his shoulder.
“Ari, the Seder is about to begin.”
He turned and looked up at her and she stepped back as though from a physical blow. She was shocked by Ari’s face, distraught with a suffering that she had never seen in a human being. Ari Ben Canaan’s eyes were filled with anguish. He looked at her but he did not seem to see her. He turned and hid his face in his hands and his shoulders sagged with defeat.
“Ari ... we must have the Seder ...”
“All my life ... all my life ... I have watched them kill everyone I love ... they are all gone now ... all of them.”
The words came from profound depths of an unbearable despair. She was awed and half frightened by the almost tangible emotion that tortured the now-strange figure before her.
“I have died with them. I have died a thousand times. I am empty inside ... I have nothing left.”
“Ari ... Ari ...”
“Why must we send children to live in these places? This precious girl ... this angel ... why ...
why
did they have to kill her too ...?”
Ari staggered to his feet. All the strength and power and control that made him Ari Ben Canaan was gone. This was a tired and beaten hulk. “Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?”
The years of tension, the years of struggle, the years of heartbreak welled up in one mighty surge. Ari lifted his pain-filled face to heaven and raised his fists over his head. “God! God! Why don’t they let us alone!
Why don’t they let us live!
”
And his powerful shoulders drooped and his head hung to his chest and he stood and trembled.
“Oh, Ari ... Ari!” Kitty cried. “What have I done to you! Why didn’t I understand? Ari, my darling ... what you must have suffered. Can I ever be forgiven for hurting you?”
Ari was exhausted, drained. He walked along the edge of a stall. “I am not myself,” he mumbled. “Please do not let the others know about this.”
“We had better go in. They are waiting for us,” Kitty said.
“Kitty!”
He walked toward her very slowly until he stood before her looking down into her eyes. Slowly he sank to his knees and put his arms around her waist and laid his head against her.
Ari Ben Canaan wept.
It was a strange and terrible sound to hear. In this moment his soul poured out in his tears and he wept for all the times in his life he had dared not weep. He wept with a grief that was bottomless. Kitty pressed his head tightly against her body and stroked his hair and whispered words of comfort.
“Don’t leave me,” Ari cried.
Ah, how she had wanted to hear those words! Yes, she thought, I will stay, this night and for a few tomorrows, for you need me now, Ari. But even as you show tears and humility for the first time in your life, you are ashamed of them. You need me now but tomorrow ... tomorrow you will be Ari Ben Canaan again. You will be all the strong, defiant Ari Ben Canaans who inure themselves to tragedy. And then ... you will no longer need me.
She helped him to his feet and dried his tears. He was weak. Kitty put his arm over her shoulders and held him tightly. “It is all right, Ari. You can lean on me.”
They walked from the barn slowly. Through the window they could see Sarah lighting the candles and reciting a benediction.
He stopped and released her and straightened himself up, standing tall and strong again.
Already, so soon, he was Ari Ben Canaan again.
“Before we go in, Kitty, I must ten you something. I must tell you I never loved Dafna as I love you. You know what kind of a life you must share with me.”
“I know, Ari.”
“I am not like other men ... it may be years ... it may be forever before I can ever again say that my need for you comes first, before all other things ... before the needs of this country. Will you be able to understand that?”
“I will understand, always.”
Everyone entered the dining room. The men put on skull caps.
Dov and Jordana and Ari and Kitty and Sutherland and Sarah. Their hearts were bursting with sorrow. As Ari walked toward the head of the table to take Barak’s place, Sutherland touched his arm.
“If you would not be offended,” Sutherland said, “I am the oldest male Jew present. May I tell the Seder?”
“We would be honored,” Ari said.
Sutherland walked to the head of the table, to the place of the head of the family. Everyone sat down and opened his copy of the Haggadah. Sutherland nodded to Dov Landau to begin.
Dov cleared his throat and read. “
Why is this night different from all other nights of the year?
“
This night is different because we celebrate the most important moment in the history of our people. On this night we celebrate their going forth in triumph from slavery into freedom.
”
Leon Uris (1924–2003) was an author of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays who wrote over a dozen books including numerous bestselling novels. His epic
Exodus
(1958) has been translated into over fifty languages. Uris’s work is notable for its focus on dramatic moments in contemporary history, including World War II and its aftermath, the birth of modern Israel, and the Cold War. Through the massive popularity of his novels and his skill as a storyteller, Uris has had enormous influence on popular understanding of twentieth-century history.
Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the son of Jewish parents of recent Polish-Russian origin. As a child, Uris lived a transient and hardscrabble life. He attended schools in Baltimore, Virginia, and Philadelphia while his father worked as an unsuccessful storekeeper. Even though he was a below-average student, Uris excelled in history and was fascinated by literature; he made up his mind to be a writer at a young age.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Uris dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a radio operator in the South Pacific, and after the war he settled down in San Francisco with his first wife, Betty. He began working for local papers and wrote fiction on the side. His first novel,
Battle Cry
, was published in 1953 and drew on his experience as a marine. When the book’s film rights were picked up, Uris moved to Hollywood to help with the screenplay, and he stayed to work on other film scripts, including the highly successful
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
in 1957.
Uris’s second novel,
The Angry Hills
(1955), is set in Greece but contains plot points that center on Jewish emigration to the territories that would eventually become Israel. The history that led to Israel’s earliest days is also the subject of Uris’s most commercially successful novel,
Exodus
. Not long after Israel first achieved statehood, Uris began researching the novel, traveling 12,000 miles within the country itself, interviewing over 1,200 residents, and reading hundreds of texts on Jewish history. The book would go on to sell more copies than
Gone with the Wind
.
Uris’s dedication to research became the foundation of many of his subsequent novels and nonfiction books.
Mila 18
(1961) chronicles Jewish resistance in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghettos, and
Armageddon
(1964) details the years of the Berlin airlift.
Topaz
(1967) explores French-American intrigue at the height of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, while
The Haj
(1984) continues Uris’s look into Middle Eastern history. Much of Uris’s fiction also draws explicitly from his own travels and experiences:
QB VII
(1970) is a courtroom drama based on a libel case against Uris that stemmed from the publication of
Exodus
, and
Mitla Pass
follows a Uris-like author through Israel during the Suez crisis.
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty
and
Jerusalem: Song of Songs
are sensitive, nonfiction documentations of Uris’s travels and include photographs taken by his third wife, Jill.
Throughout his career Uris continued to write for Hollywood, adapting his own novels into movies, and working as a “script doctor” on films such as
Giant
and
Rebel Without a Cause
.
QB VII
was adapted for television, becoming the first ever miniseries. Uris passed away in 2003 at his home on Long Island. His papers are housed at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
Leon with his parents, William and Anna Uris, who divorced in 1929. William “Wolf” Uris emigrated from Russia to America in 1921 and worked a string of blue-collar jobs before settling into a position as a Communist Party organizer. Anna, who came from a close-knit Jewish family in Maryland, raised Leon and his sister, Essie, mostly in Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia.
A young Uris in 1929, probably at his family’s home in Baltimore. Throughout much of his early life Uris was shuttled between his father in Philadelphia and his mother in Baltimore. He eventually came to regard his mother as “psychologically unhinged” and his father as a “failure.” This led him to seek success in the world at all costs. “I can say without hesitation,” he once wrote, “that, from earliest memory, I was determined not to be a failure.”
Uris as a young soldier in the Marine Corps. Uris enlisted in the Marines during the height of World War II when he was just seventeen years old. He subsequently served as a radio operator and saw combat in the South Pacific. His war experience represented a defining moment in his life, shaping his outlook on politics and providing rich material for his first book, the blockbuster novel
Battle Cry
.
Uris with his first wife, Betty Beck, in 1945. The two met during the spring of 1944 in San Francisco, where Betty was stationed as a marine sergeant and Uris was hospitalized for malaria, a disease he contracted during his tour in the Pacific theatre. Initially their relationship caused some friction between their respective families since Leon had been raised Jewish, while Betty hailed from a Lutheran family of Danish descent in rural Iowa. However in 1945 the couple tied the knot and began a happy life in the Northern California suburbs.