EXODUS – THE NOVEL AND THE BOOKSHOP

Leon Uris may have been best known as a novelist but he played a crucial role in focusing attention on the Holocaust and Israel in the late 1950s and early 1960s with “Mila 18,” a novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and “Exodus,” a saga about the Jewish war of independence that features the blockade-running ship famously known as Exodus 1947.

It turns out that Uris did not only write books — he sold them, too.

Kevin Roderick discovered that Uris opened a bookstore of his own on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks in the summer of 1960.  In a play on his own literary success, Uris called his store the Exodus Book and Record Shop. Roderick posted a publicity photo of the author-bookseller — along with a fetching young lady dubbed “Miss Bookworm” — at