This third novel by Leon Uris played an incomparable role in Jewish history of the second half of the twentieth century and especially in the process of awakening the national consciousness of the Jews of the Soviet Union, most of whom perceived Uris’ book as an unconditional call for repatriation.

Immediately after the book was published in the USSR, it was not published, of course. But the total samizdat circulation of Exodus from 1963 to 1985 amounted to more than 10,000 copies. Considering how copies of the almost eight-hundred-page book were reproduced by Jewish refuseniks, “prisoners of Zion” and dissidents of the “most reading country” - this was a real feat, comparable only to copying Solzhenitsyn’s “GULAG Archipelago”. By the way, what these two books have in common is the mystical power and amazing heroism they charged people with. It is probably not for nothing that David Ben-Gurion called the book Exodus the greatest book ever written about Israel. But Exodus is not only a novel about a new, emerging Jewish state, but also a book that looks, as befits an epic narrative, into the past of the Jewish people. As for two, three or more translations of “Exodus” into Russian - the first of them is credited to Abraham Shifrin, the author of the book “The Fourth Dimension”. In 1963, he was sitting in a camp in Potma, where the book “Exodus” somehow ended up in English. And Shifrin translated it for his fellow prisoners. When he had a little less than six months left before his release, he got down to work seriously and translated the entire book. His translation, as I understand it, is “reference”. After serving more than fourteen years, he took him with him to Odessa. From this moment begins the triumphant march of Leon Yuris's novel across the USSR...

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