Bestseller Revisited

EXODUS (626 pp.)--Leon Uris--Doubleday ($4.50).

This sprawling novel sets out to give full-dress treatment to the founding of the state of Israel. Reaching from the first Zionist stirrings in 1881 to the Arab war of 1947, Author Uris packs his pages with arresting scenes. Leaky, spavined steamers, jammed to the scuppers with Jews, make the dangerous run to the Palestine beaches; murder gangs of Jews and Arabs hunt each other out in the sun-bleached hills; intrigue and chicanery fill the halls of the United Nations and the chancelleries of Europe; the innocent and the defenseless suffer and die more often than the clashing soldiery. The battle scenes are well and cleanly done, but too often the author's flag-waving enthusiasm for Zionism diminishes rather than exalts the achievement of the Israelis, particularly when Uris pictures the Arabs either as witless dupes or as "the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners and white slavers."

Author Leon (Battle Cry) Uris, 34, spent two years and traveled 50,000 miles getting the facts for his story, and he relates it in a serviceable, exclamatory prose. But he has written a novel as well as history, and no amount of research can help him in his fiction. His hero, Ari Ben Canaan, has all the two-dimensional subtlety of a sheriff in a TV western; his heroine, Gentile Kitty Fremont, is so often petty-minded and petulant that some readers may suspect Author Uris of a bias against shiksas. Despite its partisan trimmings, Exodus in large measure tells how the Israelis won their homeland. The tepid love story of Ari and Kitty can be skipped.

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