Born in the Lithuanian shtetl of Jonava in 1929, the Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, although he settled in Israel in 1993. He began his literary career in the 1950s, and kept writing until the end of his life, producing a series of memoiristic novels about his family, the Holocaust, and Lithuanian Jewry. Kanovich died on January 20. Elena Guritanu and Elie Petit consider his life and work:

Like Faulkner, Kanovich created his own imaginary territory, . . . populating it with characters from his own childhood—mainly ordinary Jews, but also Lithuanians, Poles, Belarussians, and Russians. Published in 2010, “Poor Rothschild,” [one of his final works], set in a shtetl, is a testament to a part of this world that unfolds in a dozen novels. Together they form an epic saga, haunted by the Shoah, dealing with the vicissitudes of East European Jewish history from the 19th century to the present day.

On the eve of the German breakthrough in Lithuania [in 1941], at only ten years old, Kanovich fled to Kazakhstan and the Ural Mountains where he spent several years with his parents. When Grigory Kanovich, the future author of the Lithuanian Jewish saga, returned to Vilnius, he was sixteen years old. Wilno [as it was called before World War II]—the Jerusalem of Lithuania which he had left in a hurry in 1939—took up all the more space in his adolescent imagination as it was nourished during those years of painful separation by the stories of his relatives and their memories; their uprooting gave it an air of legend.

But it is no longer the storytelling town of his childhood that he finds, following in his mother’s footsteps with fear. There is an absence. The ruins of a Jerusalem that hides under heaps of snow the tragedy of a murdered people. Kanovich will never cease to reconstitute the memory of these beings who disappeared in the earthquake of the Shoah, not to offer them a burial but to inspire them again with a breath of life and, with them, to rebuild with fiction the pre-war Lithuania and its Jerusalem.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].