Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-17
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...
The skies are alive with the usual whooshes, hums, and thuds. No booms yet. I haven't heard any for a few days.1
But while writing this in the afternoon, sitting in my basement apartment, I hear the loudest flyover that I think I have ever heard. I remember the celebrations in an American city in which I lived (I forget which one) in which the Air Force, or another group like that, used to have coordinated flights of fighter jets zoom over the city. This was louder. But no boom.
On a local news site, an Air Force commander in the reserves here categorizes the sounds in the sky with Hebrew onomatopoeia.2 Google Translate reads it as: "Remotely Manned Aircraft and drones make a buzz (zimzum). A fighter jet booms on my voice (boom al koli). A missile whistles (sh'rikah). An interception in the air is an explosion (pitzutz) and then another explosion. "
Even without the sounds overhead and those of the landlords upstairs, my apartment has its own life of gentle noise. Peripherals on my computer chirp and whir. The rotating fan, when on, hums. It clicks faintly when changing direction. The refrigerator has its own deep groan that makes the floor vibrate. Even when my ears don't notice it, I can hear it with my feet.
Tiny animals creep in and move silently. I don't hear the lizards, slugs, and roaches as they glide across the floors and up the walls. I only see them. I don't disturb them. They don't know that humans, without asking them, have claimed this territory. They're only a problem when they get into food.
I do sometimes hear the cats outside, when one is in heat, or they are squabbling. A couple of them (only recently kittens, now full-grown) come up to me and purr. But they quickly lose interest when they see that I'm not bringing them food.
The landlords and their children and grandchildren hang out in the yard and talk on weekends when it's not too hot or raining. The workers in the yard next door —
And right in the middle of that sentence, precisely in time for the 6 PM news, a siren blares. I grab my phone and go into the shelter next to my kitchen. My landlords join me a few seconds later, just as we hear a boom.
They turn on a light switch that I hadn't recognized in the dark. I ask them what the word is for "switch." The landlord says something like shtarter. His wife corrects him. That's Yiddish. The Hebrew is meteg. (Looking up the Yiddish online when I have trouble remembering it, I find a different word, bashtimen. But Yiddish has a lot of different words for things, depending on where people are from. I remember my father disagreeing with my grandmother, his mother-in-law, over whether "the window" is das fenster or die vinde.)
We stay in there for about five minutes. We figure that by that time, staying indoors, we have little to fear from shrapnel. My landlord tells me, though, about one time he (or was it someone else? It was a little hard to tell) was working in a nearby town when they heard a siren. A fragment of the rocket fell on the building's roof. It was about the size of his forearm. When he got up there, it was still hot. The crater in the roof was surrounded by small streaks. He brought it home.
When I get back to my desk, I immediately check WhatsApp for a message from my family at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. We always post to our family's channel when there are sirens. There isn't anything. I worry for a second, then realize that it's Shabbat already. They have turned off their phones.
I write a little more, then put supper together. I don't have much that I feel like cooking right now, so when I was out shopping, I picked up something from my usual chicken joint. That, plus wine and challah, will make for a reasonable Shabbat dinner.
Afterwards, I may watch one of the videos of Stockhausen operas that I got recently.3 Odds are that at least part of what I watch will sound like my environmental noise. That's OK. I'm already soaking in it.
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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.