Having recently visited the small city of Drohobych in northwestern Ukraine to see the places inhabited by its most famous son, the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, Edward Serotta reflects on his strange life and stranger legacy.

Things would go horribly wrong later. But during the 1920s and 1930s a newly reconstituted Poland threw itself into a flowering of art, literature, music, film, and culture, not dissimilar to what was happening in Weimar Berlin and interwar Vienna. Jewish men and women were painting and sculpting, others were publishing poetry and fiction in Yiddish and in Polish.

Of all the writers I had been chasing down and looking up in my journeys through Ukraine, none is as enigmatic as Schulz. He published only two slim volumes of short stories of less than 300 pages, and rarely ventured long from Drohobych. Yet his writing, which probably holds more metaphors and magical descriptions per page than just about anyone’s, manages to draw you into the imaginary world of a family much like his own while casting its peculiar spell.

Schulz was murdered by the Nazis after producing a set of murals for an SS officer’s children. These murals, and their postwar fate, have a story of their own.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.