[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 31 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...
Only one family in my neighborhood does Halloween. Most years, for the full day, a chair with bowls of candy props open the front gate. Spooky paper cutouts surround it. The house was built during the COVID lockdowns. I don't know if the family greeted trick-or-treaters in person wherever they lived before that.
I check their gate on my way to work today. It's locked. There's nothing special there.
We weren't supposed to have work today. It was supposed to be Election Day. It's a legal holiday, to make sure that the most people can vote. Buses are free. But when the war started, the government postponed the elections until sometime in January. We don't do absentee ballots, and over three hundred thousand people are in the Reserves and army, and can't get home now.
When I reach my office, I get a message from friends. They had thought of me while waiting out a gunfight on their street, in the middle of a city in the States. If one of them had been sitting in their usual chair on the porch, they would have been in the line of fire. After reading about my sprints to the staircase during rocket attacks, they say that they'll feel less silly hitting the ground when needed.
US cities aren't really as dangerous as some politicians make them seem. I'm told that rural areas can be just as bad. But shootouts happen.
I get emails about artistic responses to our war. A performance spot at the far end of the next city south is having two free classical concerts this coming weekend. One ensemble seems especially intriguing: along with a guest singer, they play baroque cello, baroque guitar, and bagpipes. Or maybe not bagpipes. That's what Google Translate says, but I see that the same word means "recorders." That makes more sense.
Above the listing of the events, bold type in the email says, "We follow the safety guidelines, and there is a protected area near the studio in case of an alarm."
An art gallery in the same complex, a couple of blocks away, is showing "the work of the gallery artists in the shadow of war." A note at the top of the email says, "The gallery is open in a limited format. You are invited and invited to come to us for a little escapism, sit and talk over a cup of coffee or tea and see art." I do a double-take at "invited and invited" in the Google translation. I look at the original. It uses both the male and female forms of "invited," which doesn't come across in English.
In a square in our capitol, surrounded by their city hall, over two hundred empty beds are neatly lined up, strewn with books, blankets, pajamas, toys, and other such items. Like the chairs at the Shabbat table across from our city hall and in Times Square last weekend, each bed represents a hostage.
Last night's newsletter is in my work email. I spot an error: The "refugee camp to the west" that I mentioned yesterday is actually to the east. (If it were to the west, it would be under the sea, where it might be safer.) I often mix up East and West, as well as Left and Right, and a lot of other arbitrary binary pairs. Don't ask me for directions, unless I have time to make sure that I'm using the correct words.
At the afternoon prayers, someone hands out a page with the text that we had been adding since the war started. The top of the page seems to say, "An Easy Chapter." That's incongruous, at best.
It dawns on me later that the first line of the text, at least, is from a psalm. They are identified, as in English, by their numbers. In Hebrew, though, the numbers are often represented by corresponding letters. (There's a whole branch of textual interpretation and mysticism, Gematria, based on this.) The word I read as "Easy" is kal in Hebrew. The letters that sound like k and l are used for 100 and 30, respectively. I look up, "Out of the depths I call to you..." Yep. Psalm 130 it is.
Before we reach the psalm, I quietly recite the Mourner's Kaddish, along with one other person. It's my father's yahrzeit (a Yiddish word, not Hebrew, but common here): on the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of his passing a couple of decades ago. I would probably have missed the date, but a relative carefully tracks this information. If I ever need the date on the secular calendar, I have to look it up in the book that I was writing at the time.
The prayers end just before 2:30. I go into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Right when it starts flowing, the sirens go off, first from my phone and then outdoors. That's odd. They usually happen precisely on the hour. Maybe the enemy knows of a newscast on the half hour that I don't.
We gather, as always, in the staircase. I stand next to a coworker who has just cleaned up the kitchen. I realize that I had put a small cup under the spout. When I do that, I usually stop the flow of coffee before it can overflow. I'm not there to do that now. I apologize profusely.
The sirens reach my house. A friend is there. She helps me occasionally with household things. (I would never win a Good Housekeeping medal.)
Our house's shelter is in the basement, next to my kitchen. When the sirens start, my landlord bursts in through the door and goes into the shelter. My friend hovers in the kitchen, but the landlord insists that she come onto the shelter with him. She does, and listens for more information.
When we get the "All Clear," I go back to the office kitchen. To my surprise, the coffee hasn't overflowed. Right before it would have, the machine had stopped and demanded that we refill the water tank. What is normally an annoyance is now a miracle.
I go through the news feeds looking for more information, but then stop. An article says that they found part of a massacre victim's skull. Her body wasn't there.
I seem to hit a wall. I've been reading and watching too much. I don't need to repeat everything that's in the papers. You can read the same sources that I do, primarily the New York Times, the Times of Israel, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, and TruthOut. I don't have to repeat what they say. If I just report what I see myself and what's in very local or niche media, I hope it will be sufficient.
And I'm continually aware that I'm living a quiet life, while hell has opened up an hour's drive away. People who are there are telling their stories directly, better than I can.
On the way home from work, I stop for a milkshake at my favorite local ice cream shop. When I start to order, the worker switches to English. I can't seem to do the Hebrew pronunciation, "meelk-shek," convincingly.
I try to continue in Hebrew, but get stuck when I can't immediately pronounce the words for "chocolate chips" on the bin for the ice cream I want. It's pitzputzei shokolad. I have no trouble with shokolad, but don't know what vowels to put in pitzputzei. I give up and point. He scoops the right thing.
I make sure to pass the Halloween house on the way home. There's nothing there. The gate is locked. The house is silent. I guess they decided that we don't need even more scary things.
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.