With my usual hyperbole, let me just say that I think this novel, first published in 1961 and dismissed as "trash" by a Jewish intellectual, should be required reading on all college campuses. It may not be literature, but Leon Uris conveys both the awfulness of the antisemitism that led to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1942, shortly after the Nazis began their mass extermination of the Jews, and the unsung heroism of those who participated against all odds of survival.
Uris paints a undeniably vivid picture and personifies all the issues of the day with a cast of believable, if thinly sketched Polish Jews, including a roster of women every bit as fierce as the men. Readers will love most of them as much as they hate the Nazis, particularly those whose training at Dachau includes strangling dogs they have raised from puppies upon command to determine if they are suitable candidates for the SS.
Mila 18 begins with the imminent Nazi invasion of Poland pretty much taken for granted. What ignorant readers like myself will learn for the first time is how the Polish army defended itself from tanks and bombers in 1939: with sabers on horseback. Leading the charge in a battle that borders the surreal is Andrei Androfski, who rides Batory, a trusty steed, and has managed to earn the respect and admiration of his men in spite of his Jewishness. Naturally, his love interest turns out to be a spoiled Catholic girl but hey, this is foremost a potboiler of the highest rank written to be devoured breathlessly despite its considerable length. It brought me back to my teenage days when my only criteria for evaluating a book's worth was how quickly I turned the pages and how eagerly I came back to it each day.
Sixty years later I'm sophisticated enough to recognize that while Mila 18 is "based on a true story" as they say, it's nevertheless a triumph of post-war propaganda. It's impossible not to weep during a boy's clandestine bar mitzvah speech or be inspired by a pacifist's conversion to fighting antisemitism with more than words:
Today a great shot for freedom was fired. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marks a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of return to a status of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers.
For contemporary readers, it's just as hard not be gobsmacked by the similarity between the underground tactics employed by the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto and those of Hamas in Gaza, minus the latter's deployment of human shields.
I had the same reaction not long after watching Exodus, a movie based on another Leon Uris novel, shortly before the most recent conflict between the Arabs and Jews erupted. Absolutely nothing has changed since 1948, except perhaps the technology and the ethnicity of the oppressors.
My father gave me a country which hated me, and you have given your sons a ghetto and genocide. God only knows what kind of a world Wolf [the novel's youngest member of the resistance] will hand to his sons. It has always been this way—this endless war. No one of us ever really wins in his life. All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.
Uris knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote Mila 18. He shrewdly gives a non-Jew the last word. Christopher de Monti, an often dissolute journalist in a doomed love affair with a Jewish woman whose husband serves as the head of the ghetto's Judenrat and whose children are valiant members of the resistance, has been tasked with preserving the journal kept byAlexander Brandel, the conscience of the novel (Emanuel Ringelblum, who kept meticulous accounts of daily life in the ghetto and recruited others to do so, too, likely inspired this character). Nearly every chapter begins with a lengthy excerpt, providing the historical record for the story. DeMonti picks up where Brandel leaves off after smuggling the journals to safety:
I believe that decades and centuries may pass, but nothing can stop the legends which will grow from the ashes of the ghetto to show that this is the epic in man’s struggle for freedom and human dignity.
Two weeks before the New York Times published the allegations of sexual misconduct that would result in his criminal prosecution, Harvey Weinstein announced his plan to direct a filmed version of Mila 18, invoking his friendship with recently deceased Elie Wiesel and pitching the concept as "Jews with guns." I have absolutely no doubt he believed his affiliation with so noble a project would help protect him from the firestorm that followed. While Weinstein deservedly went down, I would have loved to see his movie which, at the very least, would have rekindled interest in a book that will never let us forget.
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