Books: Back to The Wall

MILA 18 (539 pp.)—Leon Uris—Doubleday ($4.95).

Leon Uris writes Jewish westerns. In Exodus, the good guys were the Zionists, the homesteaders who fought for and founded the new state of Israel. The British and the Arabs were the bad guys, and no cattle rustler could be as sordid as the Arabs, "the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners and white slavers." In Mila 18, there are both good and bad Jews. The bad ones assist the Nazis in the systematic extermination of their fellow Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. The archvillains are the Germans—all cynics, slobs, sycophants and sadists....