The Glory was published by Little, Brown in 1994 and completes the Israel diptych begun with The Hope, covering the period from 1967 to 1982. If The Hope depicted Israel’s heroic age — the improvisations of independence, the triumph of 1967 — The Glory depicts the more complex subsequent period: the shock of the Yom Kippur War (1973), when Israel came closer to destruction than at any time since 1948; the peace process with Egypt; and the divisive Lebanon War of 1982.
The novel follows the same four families from The Hope into a period when Israel’s moral certainty begins to fracture. The Yom Kippur War shattered the confidence that the Six-Day War had created: the intelligence failures, the initial military defeats, the heavy casualties all demonstrated that Israel’s security was not guaranteed by military superiority. The subsequent peace with Egypt (the Camp David Accords of 1978) divided Israeli society between those who saw peace as the ultimate security and those who saw territorial concessions as existential risk.
Wouk’s sympathies remain with Israel, but the novel acknowledges complexity in ways that The Hope did not: the Lebanon War is depicted as morally ambiguous, the settler movement receives skeptical treatment, and the political divisions within Israeli society are presented honestly. The “glory” of the title is both celebratory (Israel’s survival and achievements are genuinely glorious) and ironic (glory comes at a price, and the price is measured in lives and in moral compromise).
Collecting The Glory
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1994): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Without jacket: $5–$10