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| Yoram Kaniuk |
The Commander of the Exodus |
| Novel |
"The State of Israel was not born on 15 May 1948, when it was formally declared at the Tel Aviv Museum. It was born a year earlier, on 18 July 1947, when a battered American ship, the 'President Warfield,' renamed 'Exodus 1947,' limped into the port of Haifa." So opens Kaniuk's book which tells the true story of Yossi Harel, the commander of the 'Exodus/' This ship became universally famous thanks to Leon Uris' novel and the epic film made in 1960 by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman in the role of the commander. The story of this immigrant ship became the justification for the creation of the State of Israel, rather like the 'Boston Tea Party,' which led up to the American War of Independence.
Kaniuk's treatment of the biography is unusual - lively, emotional, at times ecstatic, its language poetic, it reflects an original approach by a writer who is not a professional biographer. He paints the portrait of a bold and adventurous, yet sensitive and responsible, 'sabra', whose forefathers had settled in Palestine in the 18th century, who joined the Haganah at the age of 14 and took part in the struggle of the Jewish community against the British Mandate. Then, with the outbreak of World War Two, he joined the British Army and fought in the battles in the Libyan desert and in Greece. But the climax of Yossi Harel's career was his command, between late 1945 and early 1948, of four immigrant ships, the biggest of the 'Aliyah Bet' (the illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate), which brought some 24,000 Jews from Europe, most of them Holocaust survivors. One of these ships was the legendary 'Exodus', which was attacked by British soldiers with gas bombs, then forced back to sea and forced to unload its wretched human cargo in the German port of Hamburg, of all places. 'Two years before they had survived death by another kind of gas, in another place,' writes Kaniuk about the passengers of the 'Exodus', who were defeated by the gas attack, which also left several casualties, 'in a century in which Jews and gas should not have been made to meet again.'
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