Mitla Pas

Plot

From Publishers Weekly
Sour, self-indulgent characters and surprisingly awkward dialogue suggest that only the staunchest Uris fans will enjoy his new novel. Since it draws on the bestselling author's own life, many will buy it anyway. Aspiring novelist Gideon Zadok's paean to the Marine Corps is hailed as the definitive combat novel of World War II. To soak up some of the gravy he feels is due him, the young author moves his wife Val and two daughters to Hollywood, where the chip on his shoulder increases exponentially in size. Blaming Val when his second book flops, he pays her back by sleeping with dozens of women; she, meantime, nags unceasingly. Flashbacks show that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Gideon's father was a bombastic Communist party organizer, while his dissatisfied mother hopped from one man to the next. With his marriage heading for divorce court and his career on the rocks, Gideon takes off for Israel to redeem himself as a writer and a Jew. On the eve of the 1956 Sinai War, he tries to prove his courage and face down his painful past by parachuting into Mitla Pass with a company of Israeli soldiers. In the lull before battle, he weighs the love of his wife against his hunger for Natasha, a passionate, destructive Holocaust survivor. It's hard to believe that the unsympathetic, one-dimensional characters here were created by the author of Exodus and Trinity. First serial to Ladies Home Journal; Literary Guild and Doubl eday Book Club main selections.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Against the backdrop of the 1956 Sinai War, Uris provides a riveting portrait (possibly autobiographical) of a man caught in personal crisis. Gideon Zadok, best-selling novelist and successful Hollywood screenwriter, has come to Israel with his family to research a new novel and to shore up a crumbling marriage. But he jeopardizes that by starting a passionate affair with a beautiful Auschwitz survivor. Zadok is a man wavering on the edge of a breakdown. As the political crisis escalates, and his family is evacuated, Zadok asks to accompany Israeli paratroopers on a desperate mission to seal off the strategic Mitla Pass. The Uris name will make this book much in demand, and if it is not as much of an epic as Exodus or Trinity , it has in Zadok Uris's most fascinating character.