Arrested in 1949 on charges of “anti-Soviet crimes,” the great Yiddish author Dovid Bergelson was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in 1952. Bergelson had fled the Soviet Union in 1921 for exile in Berlin, but in 1926 began to take a more pro-Soviet stance, arguing that the USSR was the best place for Yiddish culture to flourish, and he moved to Moscow in 1934. Dara Horn writes:

[In the 1920s], Stalin’s effort to brainwash ethnic minorities involved the Soviet government’s financing of Yiddish-language schools, newspapers, theaters, and publishers, to the extent that there were even Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. During World War II, Stalin used these loyal Jews to his advantage by creating a “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” a group of Jewish celebrities, including Bergelson, tasked with drumming up money and support from American Jews for the Soviet war effort. After the war, Stalin announced that the committee he himself had created was actually part of a vast Zionist conspiracy. Bergelson and his co-defendants endured three years of torture in prison before pleading guilty to the crime of “nationalism” (read: Judaism). He was executed along with a dozen other Jewish luminaries.

For Horn, Bergelson’s work, and especially his 1913 novel Nokh alemen (rendered into English as “The End of Everything”)—which she deems one of the greatest of all Yiddish novels—can’t be entirely separated from his fate. The work tells the story of Mirel Hurvits, a “beautiful and intelligent young woman” from a respectable family who, indolent and self-absorbed, suffers from ennui and dissatisfaction with shtetl life as she moves through a succession of boyfriends:

Bergelson’s works were celebrated for being very “European” rather than “Jewish,” comparable with Chekhov rather than Sholem Aleichem. . . . The End of Everything . . . has been called the “Yiddish Madame Bovary,” and the comparison captures not only its heroine’s dissatisfactions but also Bergelson’s mastery of narrative indirection. . . . But that comparison belittles Bergelson’s originality by suggesting that a woman’s desires and small-town tedium are also Bergelson’s main subjects. Ostensibly they are, but the stakes are a lot higher when one is depicting a Russian shtetl in 1913, after decades of failed promises of Jewish emancipation and brutal anti-Semitic attacks, than they ever were for depicting small-town France. Suffice it to say that no one felt the need to execute Flaubert. . . .

The End of Everything is not so much about Mirel [as it is about] the end of East European Jewish life—and that fact places The End of Everything on the near end of a several-thousand-years-long chain of dead cities that precede it. All of the community’s motivations in the novel appear to Mirel, and perhaps to the reader, to be tedious conventions of bourgeois life. But those conventions—the imperative of marriage and child-rearing, for instance, or the emphasis on money as a means of risk-avoidance, or the traditional pieties maintained even by nonbelievers—are, in the context of Jewish culture, not merely examples of bourgeois pettiness that any individual might do without. Instead they are the cornerstones of a vast national project of preservation in exile. . . .

Bergelson, otherwise a master of subtlety, doesn’t hesitate to hit us over the head with this. The book ends with Mirel weeping in the night with no one to comfort her, deliberately recalling biblical accounts of Jerusalem’s destruction. Mirel goes into exile [from her shtetl] the day after Tisha b’Av, the summer fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple. The novel’s most powerful literary predecessor isn’t Madame Bovary. It’s Lamentations. Which means that, horrifically, The End of Everything and the end of Bergelson are not so different after all.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.