In 1965, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote and published a story, in Yiddish, about the guilty conscience of a Polish-Jewish Communist. The story was translated into English not long after it was written, but the translation has only now appeared in print. (For more on Singer’s translators, see our new essay by Ruth Wisse.)

Since moving to the country, I find myself growing sleepy by ten o’clock at night. I retire at the same time as my parakeets and the chickens in the coop. In bed, I peruse “Phantasms of the Living,” but I must soon turn off the light. A dreamless sleep—or one with dreams I can’t recall—takes hold of me until two in the morning. At two, I wake up completely rested, my head buzzing with plans and possibilities. On the winter night I will describe, it came to me to write about a Communist—in fact, a Communist theoretician—who attends a leftist conference on world peace and sees a ghost. I saw it all clearly: the meeting hall, the portraits of Marx and Engels, the table covered with a green cloth, the Communist, Morris Krakower, a short, stocky man with a head of close-cropped hair and a pair of steely eyes behind thick-lensed pince-nez. The conference takes place in Warsaw in the 30s, the era of Stalinist terror and the Moscow Trials. Morris Krakower disguises his defense of Stalin in the jargon of Marxist theory, but everyone grasps his meaning. In his speech, he proclaims that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can insure peace, and, therefore, no deviation either to the right or to the left can be tolerated. World peace is in the hands of the NKVD.

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.