Leon Uris's Mila 18.

I’m still not over it.
Still thinking today along the same lines that I have been focused on for days.
Terrorism and/or terror and/or the Holocaust and/or all of the above.
I have one portion of my bookshelves devoted to this subject matter, it is something that I have been interested in for as long as I can recall being able to read.
Even as a kid I would trundle home from the Library with my arms full of non-fictional books covering specific events of World War II, much to the consternation of my mother. I remember, my aunt was over for a visit at the precise moment when I came through the door with an armload of goriness... and she picked up one of the books I had set down. It was called The Sinking of The Bismark.
I remember the look she gave my mother.... a look that was serious, and she said something to the effect of “What is the matter with your son?”
It was a perfectly sunny day.
Kids were out playing.
It was sunny outside.
I was at the library, dragging home books about real-life WAR.
This is obviously a DNA problem!
I am not kidding you when I tell you that as I thumbed through the books over on the couch, I could hear my aunt not only commenting upon this one idiosyncrasy of mine but also adding to it the troublesome fact that I preferred corduroy to denim. [And it was true]!
“He does not wear jeans” she said in hushed tones.
What the hell was wrong with me? Was I some sort of under-developed Winston Churchill?
Would I be chewing cigars and leading a bulldog on a leash the next day, if not quickly re-directed?
I was about nine or ten years old at the time.....
But my mother (bless her soul) never discouraged me from this innate propensity.
This love of the printed word, and of history.
Never once did she ever reveal to me that there was something wrong with me.
And I am very thankful for that.
As I got older, the interest in that particular period of world history (World War II) never really diminished, but began to focus itself upon the horrors and atrocities committed by Hitler against people he did not like. Not only the Jewish people, but all manner of people.
But obviously, specifically the Jewish people.
I am vehemently opposed to racism and bigotry of any kind. Prejudice in general makes me want to vomit. But I found that nowhere did it hit me more viscerally than in some of the things I began to read concerning the Holocaust, and Anti-Semitism in general, which has a history that goes far beyond the twentieth century. In both directions, continuing into our present age.

In my adult life, I have become moreso preoccupied with fiction.
Fiction has become a new love which has not so much displaced any previous loves, but rather has enhanced them. I love when the two worlds merge.
We call it historical fiction. Along these lines I have loved reading Edward Rutherfurd, and even Dickens (whom I would argue is often writing historical fiction).
But nowhere have I been as moved, as immersed in the historical moment, as when reading Leon Uris.
Now I know what you may be thinking.
Uris is not consistent.
He will write the best book in the world, and then follow it with a real dud. (Though I speak in the present tense, Leon Uris passed away in 2003. I am still in denial. I love[d] him).
Uh-huh. I have heard it. And there is truth to the argument.
A God In Ruins. I have heard some critics contend that they themselves could have eaten a bowl of alphabet soup and randomly regurgitated a better novel.
But this does not excuse any of us from our duty to read him at his best. And when Leon Uris is at his best, there is no-one who can write better.
I would mention three of his books that I would consider as being some of the finest literature I have ever read.
These are 1) Mila 18, 2) Exodus, and 3) QBVII.
In that order.
My favorite is his Mila 18, the fictionalized account of the uprising in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto.
Here is a review I wrote many moons ago. [for amazon.com].
[In the comments section, you will find some notes on my other favorite Uris novels, to date.
I am looking forward to one day reading his books Trinity and The Haj which I have sitting here..... jumping off the shelves, toward me......]

MILA 18

"Engrossing" is the one word I would use to describe Mila 18. Once I was into it, I could barely put it down long enough to tend to other necessary things... like eating and sleeping. I lost weight! I became skittish! And not since reading War and Peace have I felt so riveted to a story.
Uris digs down deep into the soul-stretching time of Nazi terror in Eastern Europe, a period of history I am always interested in learning more about. His book is filled with non-stop action, it is tense, it is nerve-wracking. There is a scene where several of the ghetto prisoners are in a desperate scramble along an angled rooftop, and I felt that if one of them had slipped I surely would've fallen off my chair and landed amidst the ravenous guards in the courtyard down below. Their reward for NOT falling is to be trapped end-to-end along a single beam in the rafters of that same rooftop for more than a day and a night, unable to make a sound beyond breathing, while rats knaw on them, and the guards furiously stomp about just above their heads, longing to exterminate them as though they were rabid animals. While plumbing these almost unbelievable (but sadly, too true) depths of human cruelty, hatred, and injustice against fellow man, this book also scales the heights of human courage, loyalty, and dignity. And running throughout Mila 18 is the interwoven story of romantic love during perilous times. Because of the peril, some loves are lost and they die; others are found, they are born and they grow.
As the resistance forces in the ghetto begin to realize that they cannot stave off the Nazi onslaught indefinitely, the desperation increases... and one man on the other side of the wall (the reporter Christopher de Monti) willingly enters the ghetto. The woman he loves is there. But even beyond this, ever since the Nazi Horst von Epp ridiculed Chris by telling him that he represented "all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence" Chris has known that he has a historical role to play inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. He risks his life to become the one who will retrieve and publish the meticulous hidden journals that have been kept up by the chronicler Alexander Brandel. In this he succeeds.

It is a remarkable fact of history that while all of Poland fell to the Nazi power in less than a month, this rabble army of Jewish resistance within the ghetto (lacking any decent weapon) held at bay the world's mightiest military power for 42 days and 42 nights! In the end, there are precious few survivors of Mila 18. But this is not a book about death.
It is a book about life.