The Nobel Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon left strict instructions for his daughter to see that, after his death, a group of his stories be published as a single volume. In accordance with Agnon’s wishes, they appeared under the title Ir Umlo’ah, meaning “A City in Its Fullness”—the city being Agnon’s native Buczacz, where all of these stories take place, and which figures prominently in his other writings. Reviewing an English translation of a selection of these stories—edited by Jeffrey Saks and the late Alan Mintz—along with Mintz’s volume about the Buczacz stories, Ruby Namdar writes:

[I]t was Agnon’s linguistic register, his choice of a literary style that somehow managed to feel continuous with the classics of premodern Hebrew, despite his deep, ironic modernism, that set him apart from the beginning. It seems to me that it was this stylistic choice more than anything else that has made him impossible both to ignore and to emulate; indeed impossible, or at least difficult, for contemporary Israelis even to read. . . .

Given all of this, there has always been something heroic, even quixotic, about rendering Agnon into English—and how much more so the late, difficult stories recovering the everyday history of his Galician hometown of Buczacz. The stories, which range from short fragments to a complex novella of local politics . . . were often published in Haaretz to little fanfare and some puzzlement. Even Agnon’s great friend and champion Gershom Scholem described this phase of the writer’s work as “peculiar.” . . .

[Indeed], there is something essentially different about in A City in Its Fullness, something that separates it from the rest of Agnon’s body of work. Here he positions himself not as a subtly ironic . . . modernist whose motivations were in the first place artistic, but as a humble, heartbroken preserver of memory.

In addition to eliminating many of the shorter pieces, Mintz and Saks took one quite brilliant liberty with what Mintz calls the “orchestrated sequence” that Agnon left his daughter. This was to begin, rather than end, the volume with Agnon’s story “The Sign.” . . . The unusually strong style and vocabulary of [the story’s] opening seem to mark A City in Its Fullness not as a 20th-century work of short stories but as a medieval cycle of martyrdom tales, an heir to the long Jewish literature of destruction that began with the biblical book of Lamentations. . . .

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.