[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 29 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) The pharmacy is full of women. Most appear to be about my age, though I'm a terrible judge of that. Looking more closely, I do see some men around the edge of the crowd. Many of the men, though none of the women, have walking sticks, walkers, or canes.
A young mother comes in, pushing an empty baby carriage. She carries the baby with one arm. Two boys come in with her. One is tickling the baby's feet. The other keeps dropping his phone.
I'm just about out of some medicine that I take daily. It can be hard to find. I usually have to try several pharmacies. If they have it, I can only get enough for a month or so. I worry that it may get even harder to find if the war drags on.
When one customer is done, the pharmacist at the middle window doesn't call the next number. She goes into the back. A woman near me yells, "Where is she? She can't just walk away!"
Another woman sighs. "Maybe she needed to go to the bathroom. Maybe she needed to drink some water. She's human."
"Yeah? Well, I'm human, too, and I've been waiting for a long time!"
My number comes up a few minutes later. Not only do they have what I need, but I can get enough for three months. I do. I feel like I've won the lottery.
Up in the office, right at noon, we hear rocket sirens. Once again, they've been launched just in time for the news. The sound comes from my phone first, about a second before we hear the sirens outside. The boss bellows, "Gentlemen, we are invited to meet in the stairway." We all head there.
Many people go back after about three minutes., Four of us stay for the full ten. The loudspeaker says something that I don't understand. A coworker translates. "We should stay in shelter until... I don't know how to say it... the pieces of the rocket that has been intercepted and blown up have finished falling."
I tell him that the English word is "shrapnel." I ask him what the Hebrew word is. He tells me. I repeat it back. I get it wrong, missing the first letter. Another coworker says it more clearly: r'sisim. She's from Spain. She makes sure that I hear the "R". They don't know the derivation of r'sisim. I don't know offhand where the word "shrapnel" comes from, either.
Later, we hear that a large piece of shrapnel fell to earth in the yard of a school in a town next to ours. All the students were in shelters when it landed.
It turns out that there was some news buried in the muck-filled platitudes of our leaders' press conference last night. They announced that we are now in a second stage of the war. The ground incursion across the border has begun. They say that the main city there is now a battlefield.
At the news conference, the three top leaders sat together in identical black shirts. Each spoke. They took some questions. They left together.
The show of solidarity lasted a few hours. Then the Prime Minister tweeted that he wasn't responsible for the failure of intelligence, because no one under him had told him anything. The other leaders called him out on it. In a surprising move, he deleted the tweet and apologized. They continue to run around in circles. The war goes on.
My relative who went off to fight had a day's leave and got together with others from the family at a café. He was still in uniform. I'm told that people kept coming up to him and thanking him for protecting us.
Meanwhile, it appears that the enemy army and its mostly-absentee leaders are hoarding supplies, including fuel, that the people desperately need.
None of this is all that new, although the details change. There's increasing devastation across the border. Everybody blames somebody else. Communications were down for a day, which made everything worse. First responders had to drive blindly to find the newly injured. More hospitals have been warned that they should evacuate. We will be attacking enemy outposts that are next to or under them. The hospitals say that people there need oxygen. There is no way to move them.
I chat with friends in different parts of one American city. One is afraid to express support for us. The other is afraid to express compassion for those across the border.
I flip through the news when I get home. Nothing much seems new. But there will probably be surprises tomorrow. There usually are.
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.)
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L'hitraot.