[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 26 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...
(Post) Our office windows are open. Outside, it's warm, but not hot anymore.
Eating lunch, we hear a series of booms. We don't hear sirens. They're a bit further south. A relative working there hears them and goes into a shelter as needed. Later, video online shows where rockets fell, in a city along the light rail line.
A coworker tells me that he has gotten a place a few blocks from the office. He had been commuting from relatively far away. We're both living in basement apartments now. We compare our experiences. He tries to speak English. I try to speak Hebrew. Another worker, more fluent in each, adds in the words that we can't get across.
In another conversation, in the kitchen, I learn the word for "ridiculous": megukhakh. It does sound kind of ridiculous, like a Klingon coughing up a hairball. The two "kh" sounds are spelled differently and don't quite sound the same in some accents, but I can't pronounce the difference.
We hear sirens in the office just after six PM. Word has it that the enemy likes to fire them at the start of the hour to get the best real-time coverage on the news. We all sprint to the staircase. A couple of workers trot away from their separate video conferences in midstream.
We get the "All clear" after four minutes and head back to our desks. My family tells me that four minutes after a siren, there probably wouldn't be a direct hit. Just shrapnel.
The family texts some news during the day. The girl whose father is in the war to the north is doing better, but wakes up with nightmares. Her mother is teaching again. The House of a Hundred Grandmothers, continuing in its war footing, has now taken in some evacuees.
I listen to more podcasts about the war on the way home. Commentators look for ways that all this might end, drawing examples from history. Relatives of victims and of hostages speak out. Many want the hostages to return, by whatever means it takes. Many, while not forgiving the killers and captors, don't want any more death, only peace.
I see on a news site that at the UN, our representatives have given out pages with QR codes that lead to videos of the enemy's atrocities. The article shows one of them. I scan it with my phone to see what happens. Fortunately, enough of the code has been cropped for the photo that only the people meant to use it can see what it reveals.
I sit down to write this after supper. I have accumulated a long list of links to relevant articles. I start to look at them and stop. It's the weekend. I'll look at them over the next couple of days. I may actually get to bed before midnight tonight. (Shir is OK by day, has nightmares.) (The House is hosting evacuees.)
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.