Since his youth, Howard Jacobson wanted to write a novel, perhaps in the mold of his literary idols Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Stendhal. After years of failed attempts, he finally started a book that seemed to have promise—a satiric work about a frustrated professor like himself:

Something was missing from the comedy, . . . some crowning humiliation that explained why my hero felt as preposterously suicidal as he did and, more than that, lifted him out of the dimension of mere self.

As yet he had only a provisional name. I can’t even remember what it was. The important thing was to keep it unassociated. Nothing Jamesian or Conradian. Nothing that sounded like Raskolnikov or Julien Sorel. A name with no literary baggage. But you can’t have an entirely baggageless hero. Without even a provisional name he could barely speak for the particular let alone the general. Then it came to me—the person washed up in a hell more provincial than Manchester, more out of the swim of things than I’d been in Cambridge, the splenetic, self-lacerating failure whose miseries I couldn’t adequately render until I’d plumbed the dankest depths of absurdism, was called Sefton Goldberg.

And he was born in a verbal afterbirth of the most disconsolate simplicity. “Being Jewish,” the phrase that bore him went, “Sefton Goldberg . . . ”.

That was that. I was to repeat the faux-naïve phrase again and again throughout the novel. “Being Jewish, Sefton Goldberg . . . ”. And on the wave of that deceptively innocent refrain the novel got itself written.

Was I, despite myself, writing a Jewish novel? And if I was, why was I? I know the answer now. The idea that I’d put Jewish Manchester behind me was a fantasy. . . . Trying to express myself some other way—letting English sunlight into my prose (even an American version of English sunlight, a double fraud)—had proved impossible. Being Jewish, I had contradictions to resolve that necessitated my sending a far more fraught language—at once feckless and reverential—on a far more overwrought mission. And the unlikely captain of my tremulous craft, if only for this maiden voyage, was an unhappy, unsuccessful, thin-skinned (and yes, all right, over-eroticized) teacher of English literature called Sefton Goldberg.

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.