66 pages • 2 hours read
Leon UrisExodus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 5: “With Wings as Eagles”
Book 5, Chapter 1 Summary
Stretch Thompson and Foster J. MacWilliams, two backcountry Americans working for a tiny Alaskan airline service, become the agents of a new Israeli airline. They begin making flights to bring more Aliyahs of Jews to Israel from all corners of the world.
Foster’s first run is to pick up Yemenite Jews from Aden, and their unfamiliarity with aircraft lead them to interpret it as a fulfillment of an ancient prophecy in which God promised to return the Jews to the land “on the wings of the eagle” (588). Despite his repeated avowals that it would be his only flight, Foster stays in Israel and continues running Aliyah flights, eventually marrying his Jewish assistant, Hanna, and settling in Tel Aviv.
Book 5, Chapter 2 Summary
With ethnic Jews from many different cultures across the world, Israel develops a dynamic culture even while retaining the spirit and work ethic of its first Aliyahs: “Young Israel stood out as a lighthouse for all mankind, proving what could be done with will power and love” (597). Ari gets assigned to train soldiers in the Negev Desert, where Israel is attempting a daring series of land reclamation projects. Kitty, for her part, has built up the Youth Aliyah program to the point of being self-sustaining, and decides it may be time for her to leave Israel.
Book 5, Chapter 3 Summary
Barak Ben Canaan, now 85 years old, is diagnosed with cancer. When Ari returns to Yad El to visit him, Barak encourages his son to consider whether he is truly happy, and suggests that Ari has been hiding from his own feelings regarding Kitty. “You have mistaken tenderness for weakness” (605), Barak tells him, but Ari still feels conflicted. Two days later, Barak passes away and is buried next to his brother Akiva.
Book 5, Chapter 4 Summary
Dov and Karen flourish in the new state of Israel, with Dov becoming highly regarded for his keen intellect and Karen training as a nurse to serve in an outpost near the Gaza border. Dov tells Karen that he has been invited to go study at MIT so that his knowledge of hydraulic engineering can be even more useful in desert reclamation, and he wants her to marry him so they can go to America together. Despite their love for each other, Karen hesitates and is inclined to remain in Israel.
When Kitty comes to visit her, Kitty expresses the fear she holds for Karen, living so close to hostile fedayeen forces in Gaza, but Karen assures her that this is where she is meant to be, playing her part in the wider meaning of Israel’s role in the world.
Book 5, Chapter 5 Summary
The friends gather at Yad El to share the Passover together, with Kitty, Sutherland, and Dov already assembled and waiting for Jordana and Karen. When Jordana arrives, she surprises everyone by bringing Ari along, and the others withdraw to allow him and Kitty to have a private conversation. Later, just as they are about ready to sit at the seder table, they receive word that Karen has been killed by a fedayeen gang. While they grieve, Kitty finds Ari off on his own, and is shocked to see his hardened exterior fall away, revealing a deep woundedness within. He finally expresses his need for Kitty, and they return to the Passover seder together.
Book 5 Analysis
Book 5 serves as a sort of epilogue, consisting of a short set of chapters and used to wrap up the main lines of the narrative. Readers might initially be surprised by the introduction of a whole new set of characters in Chapter 1—Stretch Thompson, Foster MacWilliams, and Hanna—but the story quickly shifts back to the novel’s main characters.
Nevertheless, the sudden shift in cast serves as a reminder that the novel is more about the nation of Israel than it is about any of the individual characters. Israel moves into the next phase of its history, as Jews from all over the world begin arriving—many of them violently expelled from their immediate countries of origin in the Middle East and North Africa—but all coming to Israel as a return to their ancestral land, and thus they too share in The Struggle for a Homeland. It is worth noting the parallels between Book 1 and Book 5, as both focus on the journey of displaced Jewish migrants desperately seeking to find a way to Palestine. This mirroring of the beginning with the end gives the novel a subtle chiastic structure.
With regard to the novel’s main characters, a few storylines remained unresolved at the end of Book 4—Kitty’s choice of Israel or America, Kitty’s relationship with Ari, the future of Karen and Dov’s relationship, and even the longstanding rift between the two brothers, Barak and Akiva. Each of these storylines is resolved in Book 5: Kitty at first leans toward America, but her restored relationship with Ari at the end renders the choice for Israel more likely; Karen and Dov’s futures are upended with news of Karen’s murder, but Dov will go resolutely on; and Barak and Akiva finally find reconciliation in their burials, side by side, and each laid to rest with Ari at hand as a final confessor—Akiva in Book 3 and Barak in Book 5.
In addition to resolving the characters’ storylines, Book 5 offers a glimpse of their development. Dov has changed dramatically, and not even the trauma of Karen’s loss can drive him back into the bitter and reclusive shell of his former self. The growth arc of his character represents the hopefulness and healing that many Jews experienced as they moved from the trauma of the Holocaust to the prospect of a new life in Israel. Ari’s growth arc is also profoundly revealed in Book 5, as his father challenges him to consider whether his characteristic hardness is perhaps a weakness, not a strength, and that he would be better off acknowledging his pain, his fear, and his need for those around him. This prophetic word from his father comes to pass in the wake of Karen’s death, which is the turning point for Ari. Even after all the suffering and death he has witnessed in his people’s long struggle, the loss of Karen, and the idealistic hope she represented, brings him to the point of deep and poignant grief. His hard outer layer is peeled back, and for the first time in the story he shows the depth of his emotions and is able to articulate his love for Kitty.
None of the major themes of the novel reach the same heights in Book 5 as they did in previous books, partly because the narrative drama of securing their long-sought homeland in Palestine is now complete. The theme of the struggle for a homeland still persists, but it is not with regard to the story’s main characters, but the global Aliyah of new groups of Jews from around the world. For them, the struggle for a homeland now finally comes to its fulfillment, and it is fitting that it comes with reference to a word from ancient Hebrew prophecies—that God would gather them up and bring them back on the wings of an eagle—just as other modes of transport in the novel, like the Exodus ship, bore frequent allusions to ancient biblical traditions.
The theme of Resilience and Survival in the Face of Adversity also appears in Book 5, though in a somewhat muted form. Most of the adversities with which the novel was concerned are behind them now. The one exception to that—the attack that kills Karen—sees the thematic focus turn back again to a sense that the Jews are not so much victors as they are survivors. The triumphalist tone of Book 4 is gone, and the novel returns to a view of Jewish life as one of perpetual suffering, of plodding forward through endless hostilities, in which they survive simply because they keep going.
