In Exodus, Uris presents his characters in terms of historical events that both shape them, and in turn, they themselves influence. For example, Dov Landau learns to survive in the hellish conditions of the besieged Warsaw Ghetto, and German concentration and British refugee camps; later he is willing to take violent action in defiance of the restriction placed on Jewish immigration to British Palestine. Ari's father and Uncle Akiva walk to the Promised Land from an Eastern European ghetto, but while Ari's father defends Israel as a soldier and diplomat, Akiva joins a group that bombs the King David Hotel. Ari, a captain in the British Army who is awarded the Military Cross, and who as a young man was in Germany to help Jews leave just before the outbreak of the Second World War, protests the British refusal to allow the Exodus to sail; he declares to...