November 15, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-14

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...

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As I step off the elevator coming to work, I hear drifting, beautiful, a cappella music from around the corner.

Walking toward the sound, I see a lone woman far away, pushing her cleaning cart and shouting into her phone. She trudges slowly past branching hallways. Her voice reverberates with differing delays down the different halls.

A final hallway, between her and me, filters it further, with sheet rock walls facing ceiling-tall glass. Some of the windows are open to the rain. I don't know if the words she is saying match the lovely, inadvertent melodies. I don't speak enough Russian.

Later, in the office, we hear a sudden boom of thunder. A coworker yells, "To the staircase!" We laugh. Later still, we hear sirens. We stand, then sit down again when we hear corresponding horns from the police car and ambulance on the traffic circle below us.

Other people heard real booms one city over, later in the afternoon. Three of them were hurt by falling shrapnel, one seriously. We didn't hear it in the office. ¹

If this year were like most other years, communities around the country would have held large celebrations yesterday.² We would have had a party in our city's largest park, for a Jewish holiday that I had never heard of before coming to this country: Sigd. Jews from Ethiopia brought the festival here. It became an official state holiday fifteen years ago. In most years, there are huge gatherings, with music and lots of food. ³

According to Wikipedia, the word Sigd is interesting. In the ancient Eritrean Ge'ez language, it means "prostration," the kind of kneeling all the way to the ground that is common in Muslim worship but only done rarely in Jewish services. It's related to a Hebrew word for worship, lisgod, that I can't recall having seen before. (Someone in my family probably knows of a liturgical reference.) This connects to the Arabic masjid, for a "place of prostration," which, in English, became "mosque." These word-forms get around.

Much of the Ethiopian community had lived in one of the hardest-hit cities near the border. They are now staying in a smaller city, further east. Their muted celebration there yesterday commemorated, among others, a soldier from their community who died in combat across the border last week.⁴ His family had immigrated by walking here through the desert in Sudan. Many of those immigrants had no idea that they would find security problems here, or that attacks like they suffered were possible. But then, neither did many of the rest of us.

Families and supporters of the hostages have started a five-day march. They're walking from the square where they've been gathering in the next city over to the Prime Minister's office in the capital. ⁵ There was a similar march in July as part of the protests. ⁶ I suspect that the energy for this one will be quite different.

Artists from here, living in New York, designed the uniform "kidnapped" posters showing the pictures and information of the hostages. ⁷ They put the prototypes on Dropbox with links on social media. The posters went viral overnight.

One of the best-known missing people has been confirmed dead. Vivian Silver was a peace activist, forming groups with women from communities here and across the borders, as well as with Jews from around the world. ⁸ She had given a radio interview from within her bomb shelter as the massacres were happening, hoping for a chance to promote peace. ⁹ Her phone had been geolocated across the border, leading to hope that she was still alive. But her remains were identified yesterday.

She was a Facebook friend of friends of mine. She was a few years older than me, and lived in Winnipeg at the same time we did. Her parents and mine may have known each other. Members of my family are taking this hard.

Meanwhile, the mundane world carries on. A chamber ensemble is performing Peter and the Wolf for free. The flyer assures us that the studio is a protected space. ¹⁰

Colleges are pushing their start date back again. If this one holds, classes will begin on December 24th. Merry Christmas. ¹¹

I poke at the tech for these posts in the afternoon, while I can't focus on work. I think I may have figured out footnotes, so links connect to their context. We'll see how this turns out. One aspect is a pain: if I want to add a new one in a rewrite (and even though I publish every day, these posts go through a lot of rewrite passes), I have to renumber all the footnotes after the inserted ones, as well as their anchors in the text. I hope there's a way around that. (NOTE: Looks like I still have to work on the footnotes.Markdown is weird.)

On Facebook, I polled the community yesterday, asking whether I should keep posting the full text of these epics there, or just the opening paragraphs and a link to the newsletter. A few dozen people have responded. Of those with a preference, everyone wants me to post the full text. So let it be written, so let it be done. ¹²

On the pedestrian street, on my way home, for the first time this season, the snails are coming out. There aren't many, but they're adventurous, leaving the bushes where they usually live and getting halfway across the road. The cats look at them, sniff them, then wander on. They, at least, have learned to coexist.

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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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.

Today's links:

Some of these articles may be in Hebrew. Google Translate tends to handle them pretty well.