MILA 18 (539 pp.)—Leon Uris—Doubleday ($4.95).
Leon Uris writes Jewish westerns. In Exodus, the good guys were the Zionists, the homesteaders who fought for and founded the new state of Israel. The British and the Arabs were the bad guys, and no cattle rustler could be as sordid as the Arabs, “the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners and white slavers.” In Mila 18, there are both good and bad Jews. The bad ones assist the Nazis in the systematic extermination of their fellow Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. The archvillains are the Germans—all cynics, slobs, sycophants and sadists. The hero, Andrei Androfski, leads the gallant last-ditch uprising out of the sewers and bunkers of Warsaw, but the only time he breaks down and weeps is over the death of his horse Batory, “the finest, the most beautiful and the most fierce animal in all of Poland.”
The chief obstacle to reading Mila 18 is the reader’s own memory. The novel all but duplicates John Hersey’s The Wall. Author Uris even retains Hersey’s slow device of telling whole sections of the story in the form of journal entries from the diary of a garrulous, intellectual archivist. If the color tone of Hersey’s book was documentary grey, the hue of Uris’ novel is stage catchup, the kind of theatricality that demeans the suffering that the book is meant to dignify.
At first, Warsaw’s Jews regard the Nazis as merely another crew of history’s anti-Semites, to be endured, bargained with, and outlasted. Only as they are walled in and wiped out, block by block, do the Jews awaken to the full horror of their fate. Some drag their own screaming relatives to the death trains to buy another day of life-in-death. Others, like Andrei Androfski, opt to sally out of bunkers like Mila 18 and salvage pride and honor in the suicidal, 42-day ghetto uprising that ranks in the legends of heroism as a modern Thermopylae.
To lift the sense of doom, Author Uris relies not on comic but on sensual relief. Andrei carries on a years-long affair with a Polish Catholic girl of disconcertingly bobby-soxish ardor (“Isn’t he yummy?”). And the grand passion of the book involves a Jewish mother of two and an Italo-American journalist who deices her frigidity. Throughout, Uris’ dialogue conjures up hours of bad movie time.
Apart from the celluloid clichés, there is a legitimate drama to the whole monstrous crime, and Uris captures some of it. Unfortunately, the scale of racial mass murder dwarfs the individual. The enormity of horror resembles a cataclysm of nature like an earthquake or a typhoon, and the inequity of the struggle smothers the tragic sense, which demands a more equal conflict in which the hero duels with himself, with another man or with God. Man’s fate as it unfolds in Mila 18 contains the hound-after-fox emotions of the chase and the kill, sometimes exciting, often poignant, but always oppressive.
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