“Rambowitz” versus the “Schlemiel” in Leon Uris' Exodus

The reprinted edition of Exodus, which appeared in 1969 (the novel was first published in 1958), opens with a striking declaration from its author, Leon Uris. Pondering why the book "has met with universal success," Uris proclaims that it tells "an event unparalleled in the history of mankind...the Jews coming back after centuries of abuse, indignities, torture and murder to carve an oasis in the sand with guts and blood" (Uric preface). Such a sentiment, of course, expresses the traditional heroic Zionist narrative of Israel's founding, recognizable to most American Jews from countless rabbis' sermons, fundraising appeals by Jewish organizations, pontifications by one's relatives at Passover Seders. But the next passage is much more peculiar, though no less strident: "All the cliche Jewish characters who have cluttered up our American fiction-the clever businessman, the brilliant doctor, the sneaky lawyer, the sulking artist...all those good folks who spend their chapters hating themselves [and] the world...all those steeped in pity...all those golden riders of the psychoanalysis couch...all these have been left where they rightfully belong, on the cutting room floor" (preface). The preface concludes: "Exodus is about fighting people, people who do not apologize for being born Jews or the right to live in human dignity. Their story was a revelation to me as I discovered it in the farms and cities of Israel. And...it has been a revelation to...readers, Jewish and Gentile, alike" (preface). Never mind that Uris has mixed his metaphors here, starting off by lambasting "American fiction" but ending with an image, "cutting room floor," clearly taken from the movies. (The slip may further confirm the suspicion raised by Joel Blocker, reviewing the novel in Commentary, that Exodus "was written with one eye on the movies" [Blocker]). Never mind, either, the astounding breadth of this condemnation; one can understand Uris disliking authors who stereotype Jewish characters as "sneaky lawyers," but why, for God's sake, does he object to Jews portrayed as "brilliant doctors"? The passage is typical of Uris' writing in that it blends simplistic thinking and stylistic ineptitude with a certain crude but undeniable power; "golden riders of the psychoanalysis couch," for instance, is admittedly a memorable phrase. What concerns me most in this essay, however, is Uris' championing of Jews as a "fighting people"-proudly claiming what they deem rightfully theirs, Palestine, with "guts and blood." In Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry ( 1990), Paul Breines has distilled this warlike conception into an archetypal figure whom he pithily labels "Rambowitz." In his preface and in Exodus itself, Uris juxtaposes Rambowitz-like characters with their polar opposite, a kind of Jew he sees as vilely "clutter[ing] up" Jewish-American fiction, a type characterized, significantly, by a wealth of wonderfully onomatopoetic Yiddish words (each with its own subtly distinctive meaning, and many of which have entered the English language): nebbish, klutz, yold, shlimazl, shmo, shlepper, shlump, shmuck, shmegegge, shmendrick. Here, I'll be referring to this figure, a kind of "anti-Rambowitz," with perhaps the best-known term from this linguistic group: schlemiel. Traditionally, of course, the schlemiel is everything Rambowitz is not: weak, cowardly, bumbling, hyper-intellectual, sexually dysfunctional, feminized, hypochondriacal, paralyzed by neurotic self consciousness. Clearly, Leon Uris is not only a writer who lionizes tough Jews, but one who considers himself a tough Jew as well. This speculation is confirmed by Uris' reply to Yehiel Aranowicz, former captain of the Exodus, the actual ship filled with Jewish Holocaust survivors that after the war ran the British blockade and docked in Palestine-the pivotal story in Uris' novel, as its title implies. Quoted in Time Magazine, Aranowicz dismissed Uris' book as "neither history nor literature. …