In his debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, Jai Chakrabarti weaves together plotlines set in New York and India during the 1970s and Warsaw during World War II. Michal Leibowitz explains the premise, and the real events it is based on, in her review:

Four days before the beginning of the great deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, on July 18, 1942, the inhabitants of its orphanage staged a play. Dak Ghar (The Post Office), written by the Bengali poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, was chosen for the children by Janusz Korczak, the orphanage’s famous director. It tells the story of a dying orphan boy who is shut away from the world due to serious illness and must learn to live instead through his imagination. Korczak reportedly hoped the play would help the children learn to face death with equanimity.

No children survived the liquidation of Korczak’s orphanage. Almost 200, along with about ten of their caretakers and Korczak himself, were deported to Treblinka. . . . A Play for the End of the World, follows a fictional survivor of Korczak’s orphanage who travels to rural India in 1972 to help a group of refugees stage the same Tagore play and rescue their village from destruction.

Despite this grim historical backdrop—as well as a parallel plotline involving a bloody Maoist uprising in India—Chakrabarti exhibits what Leibowitz terms “blinding sentimentalities.”

[The] Warsaw chapters often skim over the surface of the orphanage’s harsher realities. They depict an idealized [Korczak], largely devoid of personality and entirely of vice (the historical Korczak, though saintly, was still a man, and he had a taste for vodka and sometimes displayed a temper). And they eschew the most horrible truths about life in the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, such as the occasional banishment of uncontrollable children and the fact that little beyond Korczak himself prevented those he watched over from joining the emaciated boys and girls who lay frozen to death in the ghetto’s gutters just outside the building’s walls.

Even the children’s orphanage diaries are sanitized in Chakrabarti’s version. . . . The real concerns of children in the orphanage . . . were both far darker and more practical than those of Chakrabarti’s imagined orphan child, who confronts death through the mortality of a dog, as if he is not a boy surrounded by it.

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.