The Austrian Jewish writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) is best known for his many novels, but he was also a prolific author of non-fiction. Reviewing a recent collection of his journalistic pieces, translated into English and titled The Hotel Years, Malcom Forbes finds it rich in artistry if short on prescience:

Most items [in The Hotel Years] are choice cuts from Roth’s travels for the Frankfurter Zeitung through France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Albania, and the USSR. Appearing in English for the first time, all are marvels in miniature: lightly sketched but boldly colored people and places, moments in time, fleeting joys and sudden upheavals, upswings and downturns. All are studded with Roth’s trademark metaphors, aphorisms, and mots justes. . . .

[W]hile Roth is a master at freeze-framing a moment and replaying a memory, he offers little in The Hotel Years in the way of tentative peeks into the future—political projections, economic forecasts, the likely fates of individuals. In contrast, his novels are aswirl with dark prophesies and his busy correspondence is dotted with optimistic predictions—the former turning out to be depressingly true, the latter sadly too good to be true. . . . Similarly, in The Hotel Years, in the few instances where Roth tries to look ahead, he drastically underestimates the consequences. In Berlin in 1923 he watches two high-school kids chanting “Filthy Yids!” on the street and not one passerby censuring them. “That’s how law-abiding people are in Berlin,” Roth writes. “And that discipline is heading for a tragicomic ending.” Would that it were only tragicomic.

Most of the time, especially in the later pieces, we must make do with grim foreboding. In the bleak penultimate article, penned mere months before Roth’s death, a poor man struggling to stay afloat must report to the police. “He has a document with his name on it and where he comes from and where he lives. But what it doesn’t say is how long he can stay there, and where he’s allowed to go.”

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.