Reviewing the recently re-published fiction of both Johanna Kaplan and the late Bette Howland, Joseph Epstein notes that the two writers have a few things in common: both are Jews of the same generation, both wrote for Commentary, and both went through long creative dry spells. What’s more, Epstein writes, “each might have made a convincing character in the fiction of the other.” He describes Kaplan’s work:

Kaplan writes chiefly about Jewish immigrants who fled Hitler to arrive in America, some of them with the telling tattoo of the death camps on their forearms. The land of the free and the home of the brave for these migrants is never easy. They tend to live on the old, pre-gentrified West Side of Manhattan. They worry about muggers, but even more about the thinness of American culture and the confusion of the country’s values. Many are what were once known as “kooks,” the neurotic element strong in them. “Forgive yourself your neuroses,” one character in her novel advises another. They do not let their awkwardness with English get in the way of their complaints. . . . They are preponderantly women, while the narrators of her stories are often young girls, American-born, trying to understand a world larger than the one they were born into.

A passage from Howland’s essay “Golden Age” well describes many of Kaplan’s characters: “These people were all old Jews. Judging from the accents I heard around me, most of them had come over on the boat. They were not, as the jargon goes, assimilated. . . . And yet their status is symbolic. This is no country for old men. All of them must be in the same boat; they are not entirely of America, either.”

The work of both is laced with humor and high spirits; talent and wit everywhere play through their writings. Yet their stories and essays do not bring a lot in the way of good news, or pay much attention to the rich variety and amusement of modern life. . . . Style is a great preservative in literature and the quality that both Bette Howland’s and Johanna Kaplan’s writing possess in abundance, and the reason their work has proved worth preserving.

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.