Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-13
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...
Families of the hostages are still camping out in front of the parliament building. A WhatsApp message tells me that people from around the country will be joining them Tuesday night.
It's a silent protest, with ground rules: Signs and candles, but no megaphones. Don't hassle the police: there are police among the hostages, and some died in the attacks. No violent speech: you can say, "The Prime Minister is guilty," but not "The Prime Minister is a murderer."
Our city will be hearing explosions today from the city next door. They're planned. The local news site has let us know. Security forces will be training there. Hearing explosions shouldn't worry us (unless, of course, they're preceded by sirens).
The news site is complaining, however, about loud noises at night in a residential neighborhood. It turns out that the city is replacing a sewer line after hours. People are not happy. We're jumpy about unexplained loud sounds at night.
The bosses are buying lunch for everyone at the office today. It may be a test run for a new system of regularly subsidized lunches.
They had bought us lunches for my first several years there, and apparently for some time before. The food and delivery had gotten increasingly erratic, though. We had to call the vendor just about every day to get what we actually ordered. Smashed-up salads would leak over everything. The vendor and the delivery company would blame each other.
Finally, this summer, while the bosses were on vacation overseas, the workers came to a consensus. We just stopped ordering. The cost in wasted time and aggravation had grown to exceed the cost of just getting lunch ourselves. So we stopped, and for the past few months have been making do on our own. I've figured out a healthy and reasonably inexpensive lunch. I can harvest it from the supermarket downstairs every day.
Today, we're trying a schnitzel joint downtown. Like other places in my neighborhood, I have been walking past it for years, but never tried it. I tend to be shy about trying new places to eat.
One of the programmers went around yesterday afternoon with a menu and took our orders. The options on the menu are all pretty much the same: different kinds of chicken schnitzel on something like a baguette. Everything is the same price, 25 shekels (about US $6.50). We can get fries and a drink. OK.
Around noon today, the programmer comes around again. He asks what we want on our schnitzels. I have no idea. I don't know the possibilities. He doesn't have a list.
I ask if there's a default, normal way that they make them. He's already got them on the phone. He asks them what's normali. They have a default. I order it and wait to see what it is.
Lunch arrives surprisingly quickly. We each take our orders from the bags. I expect that we'll eat together in the conference room. We don't. There's a meeting in progress there. We just eat at our desks.
My lunch is adequate. I had ordered the teriyaki schnitzel, but I can't taste the teriyaki. There's lettuce, tomato, and possibly hummus. The baguette is reasonable. It's all OK. I would probably rate it higher, had we not had schnitzel before from another place down the street. That was better, though more expensive. The programmer asks my opinion. I tell him. We'll see if we end up ordering from them more often.
One good thing: from writing this, I can now consistently type the word "schnitzel" without looking.
While I'm eating, my family forwards a Facebook post from the city. The Cinematheque is finally reopening in its new location, behind and under City Hall. They're doing a test run over the next week: single showings of four children's films.
Their website features opening sales on ticket packages. I'm quite tempted to go for the one-year pass: free entry to every film for a year, plus movie lectures and Q&As, plus discounts for other events. It's 380 shekels for the year, about one hundred US dollars. I don't recall how much their shows regularly cost, but another cinema's site nearby has standard tickets at about 45 shekels. If I see more than eight movies over the entire year, it's worth it.
City Hall is about as far from my place as the theater where I just saw the Taylor Swift movie. Direct buses (assuming they exist) run from about a block from my house to a couple of blocks from the theater, if I don't feel like walking. Several inexpensive eateries are near it, and the new location will have a café.
The old Cinematheque showed a combination of blockbusters, current obscure films, and classics. I had seen a Thor movie there preceded by a lecture on Camp, a Nick Cave concert film, and a Bowie documentary preceded by another lecture and some of his videos.
So, yes, I'm excited. Getting a year-long pass feels like a gamble, since we have this war going on, but everything does now.
Searching for a map to the theater, since I've forgotten which street goes to the back of City Hall, I notice that Google Maps is now automatically showing some public bomb shelters along the way. There's aren't a lot of them, but it's good to know. I'm fairly certain the basement of City Hall will have one. It may be the theater itself.
Rereading this, I flash, for the first time in a half-century or so, on my fourth or fifth grade musical. It was 1968. We were all supposed to write songs for it. I missed the instruction that we were to write new lyrics for existing songs. I wrote my own music. I was surprised to realize that other people couldn't do that, about as easily as they could write words.
I don't remember what I wrote, but I sang someone else's lyrics to what became "Bombshells Keep Falling on My Head." I don't remember if that part of the play was about the Six Day War or the Paris Peace Talks. And I may be remembering it completely wrong. It's been a long time.
Today's links:
- Some of these articles may be in Hebrew. Google Translate tends to handle them pretty well.
- Today - expect the sounds of explosions from the area of Ramesh • Sharon Online
- Who is responsible for the sounds of digging tonight in Green Herzliya? • Sharon online
- Israeli style schnitzel - Vered's Israeli Cooking
- Now at Cinematheque - Cinematheque Herzliya
- Subscriptions and cards - Cinematheque Herzliya
- Pasternak Square, Herzliya to herzliya city hall - Google Maps
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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.