One of the best sources of good books that I’ve found is the free book cart at the Magee Public Library. It’s often parked outside the building, and you’re welcome to take a book. I’ve found several favorites this way.
In fact, that’s how I found the second novel about modern Israel that I’m recommending for your reading lamp — The Hope by Herman Wouk.
Last week I recommended Exodus by Leon Uris. As it happens. Wouk’s treatment of the same subject and time period— the birth of the modern nation of Israel in the 20th century— dovetails with Uris’s novel to give you a fuller look at a current world issue.
I admit that the hefty size of The Hope is what made me pick it up. I like big books. What’s the point of getting emotionally involved in a book that’s going to end in 120 pages? This piece of historical fiction gives you 687 pages of involvement that will keep you entertained for days.
I was also familiar with Wouk, having read his World War II novels, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, also chunky enough to satisfy me. Some readers consider The Hope, detailing Israel’s struggle to survive, to be a sequel to Wouk’s World War II novels, picking up immediately after the war when many Jews had given up trying to live in Europe after the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel to start over.
From surviving the war and the Holocaust, the immigrants came to find themselves right back in another war when Israel was granted national sovereignty in 1948. At that point, disgruntled Arabs, who had gradually taken over much of what had been ancient Israel, began to protest and vowed to wipe the Jewish nation off the face of the earth—as they are still threatening to do today.
The Arabs had drifted in over time as so many Jews fled in the long diaspora that began as early as the captivity of Israel and Judah recorded in the Bible. Other Jews were hauled away over the years to be made slaves of conquering nations like Rome or left to avoid the conquerors who succeeded them. Many Jews were forced to flee Israel when they became Christ followers in the 1st century A.D.
Unlike Exodus, which begins with Jews escaping the Holocaust, The Hope picks up at the point where the Jewish secret army, the Haganah, has begun fighting for Israel’s nationhood. We meet brave soldiers and leaders, some fictional and some real, like Zev Barack, Don Kishote, David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, who know that living in a land of their own will require sacrifice, perhaps of their lives. They will have to take back their country one section, one village, one road, at a time, if they want a homeland.
We also see the stress and trauma inflicted on the common people. No one is exempt from the struggle.
With its length, the novel can cover the three major wars in Israel’s struggle for survival, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1956 Sinai War in which Israel won back their desert territory but was forced by the UN to give it back to the Arabs, and the Six Day War in 1967.
At the same time as they are fighting for their lives, the Israelis must try to persuade other nations to help them, since they are being overwhelmed not just by the Arabs but by larger powers like Russia, which stands in the background suppling weapons to the Arabs, and Egypt, which is threatening direct attack. As in any war, infighting among various Israeli groups and leaders is jeopardizing their success.
Wouk’s treatment of that time is very realistic, perhaps a little less romantic that Leon Uris’s depiction of the same period. Wouk details much of the diplomatic work between the Israelis and the British, the French and the Americans as Israel fights for survival and brings in much more of the world’s involvement in the conflict. I admit to getting lost in some of the diplomatic goings on, but that’s because I’m more interested in human struggles than diplomatic ones.
I was interested, though, in how political figures like Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy treated Israel’s request for help. I saw that even then, many Americans opposed helping Israel.
And yes, there are romances in the book and human situations and plenty of history that will bring you up to last night’s news, which, if you notice, still focuses on Israel’s fight for survival against nations who are threatening to wipe it off the map, literally.
Israelis’ “hope” is to survive the threats and live freely in their own land.
Exodus was published in 1960, The Hope in 1993, and I’m writing about them in 2025. And in all that time, despite their development of one of the best militaries and intelligence systems in the world, the threat of annihilation hasn’t changed much for Israel.
But as both of these good novels imply, if Israel’s enemies are allowed to prevail, the rest of the free world is next. We’re next.
