[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 24 October 2023
Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...
The water works again. (For this, too, we give thanks.) Around midnight, the landlord and workmen fix the pipes. I cheer when I hear the water rush through the faucet that I had left open.
As I wash the dishes, I find myself thinking of the people across the border. I got tangled up adjusting to three hours without water. I don't know how I would make it if water were shut off to the entire area in which I lived.
I set up the cold brew coffee to steep overnight and upload last night's epic post, then sit down in my big chair and flip on YouTube. I catch the tail end of a local TV station's telethon. It has apparently been streaming all day.
It's raising money for some cause or other related to the war. Our country's music stars appear in different places, playing with or without live crowds. Several perform at an empty Cultural Center where the emcees are. Others are in hotels and shelters, playing for evacuees. One sings for a crew of children, most of whom are in pajamas.
The current biggest star shows up in a taped segment, surprising a roomful of young girls. She is greeted by a sound like a stadium of Swifties. (I think that's the correct collective noun.) She then appears live, singing a muted version of her Eurovision hit with what appears to be a teenaged string section, all but her dressed in white.
Everyone, or at least a lot of them, comes together at the end to sing the national anthem with the country's biggest orchestra. I've seen the conductor before. Even though I know a bit of how conducting works, I can't figure out the relation of what his hands are doing to what they're playing. He seems to be leading them with his eyebrows.
I sleep well, perhaps because I hadn't drunk much water during the evening. I decant the coffee and pour myself a cup. When I lift it to my lips, some spills on my shirt. I embody a classic bootstrap problem: no one should try to drink coffee unless they had drunk some already.
The big news in the morning is of two additional hostages that have been freed, elderly women who had been working for peace.
One of them speaks to the media after being checked out at the hospital. Broadcasters say that the statement is a "debacle." The hospital apologizes for having her speak. While she describes the hellish conditions of her capture, she says that, once she ended up where they were taking her, the people there treated her well. Apparently, few want to hear any other than that everyone involved in any way across the border is evil.
While I probably know less than the pundits, I can see a couple of scenarios that would lead to their being treated well and to their release. It's possible that, once they were identified, people recognized that they were among the people who, among other things, had been helping people there get medical help over the years.
It's also possible that the team keeping the hostages were different people from the vicious ones who captured them. I understand that it's a tenet of their religion to treat captives well. It's possible that the people there respected that. The former hostage says that they had medical care and that they ate what their captors ate. And apparently she turned and said goodbye to the one guarding her when she was released.
Of course, it's also possible that, knowing that their husbands are still being held, they don't want to make things worse for them.
Still, people are, understandably, reacting out of fear, pain, and rage, and might find it difficult to see any of the enemy acting human.
Word from across the border is increasingly horrific. We're bombing a lot of the area, with high casualties. Their Health Ministry is claiming that diseases are spreading due to the lack of water.
Groups here are doing what they can to help the people on this side. My favorite computer store is collecting working electronics to distribute to the evacuees. Universities have pushed the start of the semester out to December, since so many of the students and staff have been called up. Children's schools in most of the country should be returning to normal tomorrow. The largest dairy company says that they're establishing a fund to rebuild dairies destroyed in the fighting. And the national labor union is opening an emergency hotline for self-employed and freelance workers.
On the way to work, I listen to an American podcast about a mental health helpline here. They have received as many calls in a few days as they would usually get in several months. The head of the center admits to being sleepless and afraid of shadows, and wonders when she will need to call the helpline herself.
Meanwhile, Google Maps and Waze has stopped displaying live traffic updates here. They don't want the real-time information to be used to target rockets at traffic jams.
The day is pretty quiet at work. I get a few things done. I send messages back and forth to the cover designer for my next book. It's just about ready. We're changing the title slightly. It had been "The Afternoon Prayers." It's now just the more evocative "Afternoon Prayers."
During the day, someone who knows that I love trains asks me what passengers are to do if they hear alarms. I don't know. I look it up. We're supposed to stay on the train and duck down below the window line.
On buses, on the other hand, we're to get to a shelter if one is close enough. (A relative did that when a siren went off as her bus was passing a medical center.) If not, we're to lie on the ground with our hands covering our heads. Apparently the biggest danger is from shrapnel, and that tends to fly up in the air rather than moving horizontally close to the ground.
In the office, at exactly five PM, we hear rocket alarms. We haven't had any for several days. Someone calls out, "Class trip!" Someone else hollers, "Does anyone have cookies?"
I'm reminded of something I heard or read about a young family near the border. In order not to scare the children, they turn the sirens into a game: when they hear one, they all join hands and sing a special song while running to the shelter.
We sprint dutifully to the staircase. I text my family. They text back. Those at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers are in their hallway, as usual. The house is built so that the hallways are effective shelters.
We're supposed to stay in the staircase for ten minutes. Some of the team head back after four or five. I'm one of the last to return to the office. Word has it that a rocket fell near a settlement about a dozen miles from us. Or maybe that was an earlier rocket whose siren we didn't hear. Anyway, there are no injuries.
Some workers who came in early head home. The rest of us go back to our desks. Like most of us, here and across the borders, we try to carry on as normally as we can while sitting under the scimitar of Damocles.
Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.
Here’s an archive of past newsletters.
You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.
The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
L'hitraot.