November 23, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-22

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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(I don't have a hot take yet on the hostage deal. I tentatively plan to write about it tomorrow, when more information has come in.)

My memories of the outside world start exactly sixty years ago today. My first memory that I can connect to external events is of my family's reaction to JFK's assassination.¹ Those who were there remember it differently than I do, but we can agree on the date.

My only earlier memory is of getting a gift of blue socks from my kindergarten teacher before we moved from Winnipeg to New Jersey.

I don't remember much of the events here over the next decade that are huge in the memories of those who experienced them. Since I was a child in the States, I remember that the Six Day War happened, but not anything about it. I don't remember the Yom Kippur War at all. I do remember hearing a lot about Vietnam.

Childhood memories are like that. The thing I recall most vividly from my Bar Mitzvah was spilling my uncle's coffee on his dog.

I went to an all-Jewish school when I was a child (along with several of you).² We studied the usual secular subjects in the mornings, with religious studies and Hebrew in the afternoons.

We were taught a lot about Israel in school. Much of it, as I recall, was idealized and simplified to a level that schoolchildren could understand.

We learned a lot about kibbutzim, socialized utopias turning the desert green. Our image was of young, strong people laboring in the fields every day, then spending the evenings dancing around campfires. Pete Seeger and his friends sang their songs (back before so much of the American Left turned against Israel): The Limeliters sang "Aravah."³ The Kingston Trio sang "Dodi Li."⁴ Joan Baez sang "Dona, Dona."⁵

(I later found out that many of the things we learned as folk songs and dances from here actually had different histories, but that's another long story.)

When I got here, I found out that kibbutzim were not as I imagined. For one thing, there weren't many left. Many weren't agricultural anymore, but had various manufacturing and white-collar industries. And joining them now is difficult, For those I asked about, you have to have family there already, or buy in, which seemed unimaginably expensive (considering that I effectively came here broke).

One place that the classic agricultural kibbutzim were still thriving, from what I can tell, was the area known as Otef Aza, the "Envelope of Gaza" along our border, where much of our produce has been grown.⁶ Supplemented, to a great extent, by foreign workers, they appear to have continued as communities operating with the model that has survived since the early days.

Much of that ended on October 7th. The terrorists attacked many of the kibbutzim, murdering and abducting the residents and workers, and destroying the fields.

Many of the survivors were evacuated to elsewhere in the country. Some were sent to hotels.⁷ Others went to less elegant places in the middle of nowhere.⁸ Some of the communities have been coming apart under the stress of the new locations. Others have been able to use their strong social structures to hold together and rebuild what they can wherever they are.

These emergency arrangements were only meant to be temporary. As it now looks like the war may drag on for a long time, the residents, as well as people in the functioning parts of the government, are looking to long-term solutions.

The Agricultural Union is looking at unused buildings in other active communities, with an eye toward renvating them and incorporating the membership of the evacuated kibbutzim into them.⁹

Other groups are looking at inexpensively building new communities, though not with the shoddy designed and constructed "caravillas" that characterized many such communities in the past.¹⁰

Several other kibbutzim are looking to reestablish themselves within cities.¹¹ Some are looking to move into as-yet unoccupied residential projects. Others are looking at what had been student housing.

Urban kibbutzim aren't entirely new. Several exist. One that looks quite interesting is at the south end of the big city next to us.¹² It's near another fascinating complex of manufacturing spaces that has become a hive of artists.¹³

Making these transitions won't be easy. It will be interesting to see how the communities change in moving from an agricultural base to whatever they will do in the cities.

If I were younger, I might look forward to living in such a community sometime. I did grow up with the dream of kibbutzim. I prefer cities to farms. I like communal living.

As it is, the closest that I may get is to move into the House of a Hundred Grandmothers when I retire. There, people have individual apartments, but with a common dining hall, synagogue, and other activities. It's near transportation to most other things.

I won't ever get around to that dream of working in the fields and dancing around the campfires. But, given that I have allergies, backaches, and can't dance in rhythm to anything, I'll find a reasonable compromise.

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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.