Commander of the Exodus [Kindle Edition]

Yoram Kaniuk (Author), Seymour Simckes (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this unusual foray into nonfiction, the well-respected Israeli novelist Kaniuk (Confessions of a Good Arab) depicts the life of Yossi Harel, a Palestine-born Jew who, in the 1940s, defied the British and brought four boatloads of Holocaust survivors to Palestine. Basing the narrative on his interviews with Harel (now in his 80s), Kaniuk tells how Harel left his troubled family to join the Haganah (the Jewish militia) at the age of 14. Inspired by the revolutionary leader Yitzhak Sadeh, he fought the Arabs during the anti-Jewish riots of the 1930s and the Germans during WWII; then, after the war ended, he fought the British. Harel's first expedition brought 3,000 Jewish refugees from Yugoslavia aboard the Knesset Israel, but the British forbade their entry, and they ended up in Cyprus. Then, in 1947, Harel commanded the famous ship Exodus (an expedition later depicted in the novel by Leon Uris and a film starring Paul Newman), which sailed from France with 4,515 refugees. When the Exodus arrived, British destroyers attacked it, and the refugees went back to detention camps in Germany. Finally, in 1948, Harel commanded two more ships carrying 15,236 Jews--all of whom, due to a brokered compromise, went back to Cyprus, where they secretly boarded British ships bound for Palestine. Masterfully describing both Harel's biography and the suffering and determination of the refugees, Kaniuk portrays an ugly episode in history and provides much-needed historical depth to contemporary political debates. (It was, he argues, the global condemnation that came in the aftermath of Britain's heartless refusals that led to the birth of Israel.) (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

While the ship Exodus has been immortalized in the Leon Uris novel and Otto Preminger film (both of the same name), little was known about the ship's captain, Yossi Harel. In this capably translated book (first published in Hebrew in 1999), Israeli novelist Kaniuk (Adam Resurrected and Confessions of a Good Arab) fills in the many gaps in Harel's early career. The reader learns that the young "Zionist cowboy" served in both the Haganah (the Zionist military organization) and the British Army before commanding four expeditions (while still in his 20s) that transported over 24,000 refugees to Palestine, openly defying the British blockade. Kaniuk paints a vivid picture of the wretched conditions aboard the old ships and the violence of the British sailors. Based on interviews with the elderly Harel, the book has no footnotes or documentation, and Kaniuk notes that "some portions of this book blend historical truth with imagination it is not a traditional biography, but is absolutely based on the facts." Recommended for public libraries that have high reader interest in the subject.
---John A. Drobnicki, York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 293 KB
• Publisher: Grove Press (May 1, 2001)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0015346PG
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #170,406 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Exodus" shines with a passion, May 5, 2000

By 

James R Norton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Commander of the Exodus (Hardcover)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars exodus 2, April 22, 2011

By 

Cat mom (LI NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Commander of the Exodus (Kindle Edition)

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique state's creation story, February 1, 2011

By 

Dick Stanley (Austin, TX, United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Commander of the Exodus (Kindle Edition)

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.