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Commander of the Exodus

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World War II has always been a comforting war for Americans to reflect upon. After all, the United States stood proudly, along with Britain and the other Allies, against the menace of the Axis Powers. We fought the good fight, and won.

But a story that we hear less often is how American bombers were never sent to bomb the Zyklon-B gas tanks and railway shipping stations that kept the death camps running.

We also rarely hear about British warships ramming hulking old freighters crammed with Jewish refugees trying to emmigrate to Palestine, or America's unwillingness to let more than a few Jews (primarily scientists and well-connected members of the intelligentsia) come to America at a time of dark and terrible peril for the Jewish people of Europe.

Another rarely-told tale is the struggle to establish the State of Israel, a battle the Palmach and Haganah fought in equal parts against hostile Arabs and a British Mandate determined to prevent further Jewish settlement.

"Commander of the Exodus," a history book enhanced by the literary gifts of a novelist, tells this handful of rarely-heard tales by exploring the life of Yossi Harel, a young native of Palestine who brought over 20,000 displaced Holocaust survivors to what would soon become Israel, braving rough seas, mines and a vicious British blockade.

Harel, who is molded by Kaniuk into the deeply passionate and level-headed hero of "Commander of the Exodus," is clearly a man of substance. The staggering dangers involved in smuggling thousands of refugees across a hostile Mediterranean are explored thoroughly by the author, who paints a grim picture of the ships that failed to make it, and the refugees who died while trying to find a better life in the desert that would become Israel.

Unfortunately, Kaniuk's passionate narrative doesn't make much of an attempt to approach Palestine from an Arab, or even British, perspective. While Kaniuk's exodus narrative is stirring and sometimes devastating in its anger against a "civilized world" that helped to finish a dirty job begun by the Nazis, it's clearly a work of passion. This makes it less reliable as a history, but considerably more human and engaging.

This aside, it's clear that the author has wrought a rich historical perspective, charged with fact and drama. "Commander of the Exodus" dazzles with the sadness of history and the strength of human life.

this book gives a true depiction of immigrating to what was then palestine.the translation is excellent.i wish i could read it in the original hebrew.

Even in translation, the poetry of Kaniuk's prose comes through, in an old tale that bears repeating, especially at a time when the anti-Semitism that is never far below the West's benign surface is adding old darkness to modern light.

It's instructive to be reminded that the Arab-Israeli conflict didn't begin with contemporary Palestinian grievances and terrorism, but is at least as old as the 1920s, when a tiny minority of Jewish settlers were almost powerless to stop the periodic assaults of their majority Arab neighbors.

Or that American and British resentment of (and opposition to) European Jewish aspirations for a resettled Israel began long before there was a state. Even, as hard as it may be to accept, before, during and immediately after the Holocaust.

Kaniuk's perspective is that of a patriotic Israeli providing the background to the state's creation story, but he leavens his judgments through the worldly understanding of his main character, the sabra revolutionary Yossi Harel, the commander of the SS Exodus 1947.