Exodus

Kitty Fremont is an American nurse in her twenties, whose late husband Tom and young daughter Sandra both died during World War II. After the war, she volunteers to assist in orphanages and refugee camps, quickly gaining a reputation for her skill, efficiency, and ability to connect with children. This leads her to the British-run encampments on Cyprus, which is where the narrative of Exodus picks up her story near the end of 1946. She is close friends with Mark Parker, an American journalist who grew up with her and Tom, and she meets him on Cyprus as he begins to investigate the story behind the Jewish refugee camps.

Kitty is beautiful and winsome, described as tall and blonde, and frequently a favorite of those she meets—with the one exception of Jordana Ben Canaan, who resents Kitty for the latter’s connection to her brother, Ari. Kitty continues to bear deep emotional wounds from the loss of her daughter, which drives her almost obsessively to seek connection with another girl she meets along the way, Karen Clement. Her fragile emotional state and uncertainty about her own motivations in her participation with Jewish interests render her relationship with Ari—especially when mixed with his callused stoicism—volatile and confusing for them both.

After helping the Jewish refugees in Cyprus, she goes to Palestine to continue her work with the children of the Exodus, intent especially on keeping close to Karen. Kitty’s work with Jewish youth in Israel is effective and widely admired, but she always keeps the door open for an eventual return to her own home in America. Her admiration for the Jews and her willingness to offer compassionate care for their suffering, while still holding onto a sense of ambivalence about her long-term commitment to the Israeli cause, is in some ways a depiction of the American (and more broadly, the international) attitude toward the Jews in the late 1940s. Her romantic union with Ari at the novel’s close implies that she will choose to stay on in Israel permanently.

Barak Ben Canaan grows up as Jossi Rabinsky in the Pale of Settlement, the vast 19th-century rural ghetto for Jews in eastern Europe, together with his brother Yakov (who later changes his name to Akiva). Jossi, the older brother, is tall and red-haired, thoughtful and resolute, while the younger Yakov is headstrong and passionate.

The two teenagers, forced to flee from the Pale, walk on foot for several years until they reach Palestine. There they join with the small communities of Jews who represent the first attempts of the global Jewish community to establish a renewed presence in Palestine. They are both instrumental to the establishment of the kibbutz and moshav movements, communal attempts to reclaim the unused swamps and deserts as arable land. They also become involved in defending the Jewish community against depredations from those who oppose their efforts, with Jossi favoring a bridge-building, diplomatic approach with the Arabs and the British, and Yakov insisting on more forceful means. As such, the two brothers represent opposing philosophies for how the Jewish community should deal with their cross-ethnic and international relations.

As Jewish society in Palestine develops, they join the community’s embrace of Hebrew as their language, and both change their names: Jossi to Barak Ben Canaan, and Yakov to Akiva. Barak and his wife Sarah have two children, Ari and Jordana, and so Barak represents the patriarch of the multigenerational family that the novel follows.

As the events of the 1930s and ’40s unfold, Barak takes on ever-more important roles as a diplomat working for the Yishuv, the nascent Israeli government. He passes away shortly after Israel achieves independence, having seen its development from the First Aliyah to its establishment as a modern nation-state, and as such the character of Barak represents an entire period of Jewish history in Palestine. Akiva dies years earlier while attempting to escape from British forces. The brothers are ultimately buried side by side, suggesting a kind of reconciliation between them after years of estrangement.

Karen Clement is born into a Jewish-German family, the daughter of a prominent university professor. Only Karen gets out from under the Nazi threat by being put on a train to Denmark filled with Jewish children. There she lives with a foster family, the Hansens, who raise her in Danish society and encourage in her a love of dance. She grows into a teenager, a young woman of beauty, with long brown hair and green eyes, with a remarkable gift of compassion. She learns that her mother and siblings have died, but that her father appears to have survived the Holocaust.

Feeling the need to seek out her family and be true to her Jewish identity, Karen leaves Denmark and begins working with children at a refugee camp in southern France after the war, where she becomes adored for her cheerfulness, idealism, and uplifting personality. As events lead her ever closer to Palestine, she meets Dov Landau, and patiently works to form a connection that allows him to grow beyond his trauma. She also forms a strong connection to Kitty Fremont, who loves her so much she wants to adopt her. Karen represents a hopeful sense of youthful idealism that persists in the Jewish cause in Palestine, even amid great difficulties. It is her voice that gives expression to the high and idealistic rhetoric of what Israel means to the world, which the novel presents as “the bridge between darkness and light” (615). Even as her relationship with Dov blossoms, she hesitates to marry him and go to America because she feels her place is in Israel. As such, her murder at the end of the book is a cruel blow that reinforces the dream-shattering nature of Jewish experience at that point in history, even as their greatest dreams are being realized.