[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 21 October 2023
I get to the front door of the House of a Hundred Grandmothers just after another visitor. She doesn't ring the doorbell. I do.
The doors open. The worker at the front desk waves a finger at me. "You don't have to ring! You don't have to ring! I see you."
When I get upstairs, after my family's usual rundown of its unusually harrowing week, they launch into criticisms of what I'm writing here.
I'm living in a bubble within a bubble, they say. Not only are we in a city that the rockets mostly haven't reached, but I'm isolated from many more booms than I notice myself. Apparently, living as I do in a hole in the ground and working in a multistory office building, many of the booms and thuds that I believe are people walking heavily or moving furniture above me are really rocket interceptions. They live on their top floor, so they hear it all. It's gotten so they can tell the towns above which the interceptions happen by the direction and sound of the booms and messages from Home Front Command.
They also say that I'm not noticing the problems that businesses are having. Usually, when I walk on the main street downtown, I stick to its western end. Much of what I see are chain stores and small restaurants. Almost all are open. If they closed at all at the start of the war, it wasn't for long. The eastern side has a lot of small shops that have been owned by single families for generations. Many of them are closed. Those that are open are picked through.
Other family members are having a difficult time. The young girl whose father went off to fight is clinging to her mother and having meltdowns. Parents of other children tell the mother that this is common. I did see a couple of children with meltdowns in the mall yesterday, where I have rarely noticed them before.
The grocery stores in the girl's town, a little north of us, are also understocked. While the shops in my town have the usual amount of produce and eggs, they're harder to find there.
The girl's aunt helps schedule appointments for medical clinics. It's hard to tell whether a clinic will be open until the day of the appointment.
Family abroad are also having a difficult time, seeing increases in antisemitic incidents in the US and Europe. While workers are renovating their house, relatives have taken down their mezuzah and other obvious signs of it being a Jewish home. They are avoiding talking about the situation here, since so many other people have vicious misconceptions.
I see in the newspapers that a soldier from our town was killed yesterday by an anti-tank missile on our northern border. He had grown up in Maryland, but flew back here last week when he was called up into the reserves.
I see that aid is finally rolling across the border, far to the south. But it's only a few trucks, so far, and fuel isn't allowed. Waste treatment and desalination plants there are shutting down because they have no way to power them.
Meanwhile, garbage trucks from near us aren't getting to the dumps in our south. A decrease in air quality here leads my family to suspect that people are burning trash that they can't move. I also smell barbecues as I walk to the House. They're enjoyable, but also take a toll on the air.
Leaving the House after the havdalah ceremony, I flip through more of the news. I eventually make a cheese sandwich for supper and listen to a podcast about Diaspora-Israel relationships. It's in English, but I don't understand their academese.
Maybe I'll just finish writing this earlier than usual and go to bed. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Or maybe, back at work, within my bubble within a bubble, it will just seem that way.
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L'hitraot.