Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-01
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...
(Post)
A clowder of cats walks with me up the stairs from the backyard to the front. ("Clowder" is the English collective noun for cats, as one of our Ukrainian programmers keeps reminding me. Remember it, should you find yourself herding cats. Or programmers.) They must have heard the landlord and landlady coming out of the house. I hadn't.
The humans are amused to see me at the center of the entourage. "They must be hungry," the landlady says. "You, too?"
I laugh and shake my head.
"Have you heard?" the landlord asked. "It has returned. Soon we will --" He gestures with the hand that isn't carrying cat food: ahead, down a slope, and around a bend.
Yes. They may be joining me in the basement shelter. The war has resumed.
It's a disappointment, but not a surprise. People on each side say that the other has violated the truce agreement, whatever that was. Each is just responding. We have bombed them. They have tried to bomb us. Again.
I go downtown for my Friday shopping. Nothing seems different. I don't expect it to. Last Friday was the first day of the truce, and no one was sure that it would work. Today, we're back to the previous normal.
Yesterday, while the truce was holding, the House of a Hundred Grandmothers decided to open the dining hall for tonight's Shabbat dinner. With the war restarting today, they have apparently decided to gamble that we won't have any rocket sirens at suppertime.
This is my first Shabbat dinner there in a couple of months. The dining hall is full. I don't recognize some people. Some are new residents. Some are there temporarily while their hometowns remain evacuated. Some of the long-time residents have had to move to the Continuous Care division.
The singing of the songs before Kiddush seems muted. We all sing "Shalom Aleichem" together. 1 (And yes, I'm linking to my niece's performance of it, because it's the best one out there, and because I can.) There's one treacherous high note in the odd-numbered verses, up a leap of a perfect fourth and followed by a drop of an octave, that I keep missing.
There's a new caregiver at the table behind ours. Her predecessor took off for Montreal a few months ago. This new one seems good.
Partway through supper, a young girl, maybe eight years old, comes running in. Her grandfather lives there. She spends much of suppertime zooming around the hall with her grandfather's rollator.2 She somehow avoids crashing into anything. One unrelated resident sees her crawling on her knees to push it. He gently tells her that she should stand up, or her dress will get dirty. In this place, no matter whose child someone is, everyone is their grandmother.
I hear talk of other residents' relatives in the army. One woman, in particular, has great-grandchildren fighting now. She also has a great-great-grandchild in second grade.
My family has gotten a new air purifier for their apartment. It's big, a few feet tall and a foot wide. They can control it via Wi-Fi. They've put it on a wheeled dolly so they can move it around. It works well. When it's on, the air is clear enough that the relative with the most breathing issues stops coughing.
It's quite loud, though. When it's working along with the oxygen concentrator and the heater/air conditioner (a combined unit here, called a "mazgan"), there's a lot of noise in the apartment. Since one relative is only using one hearing aid, with the other out for repair, conversation is a challenge.
When I get home, I make my monthly selections and purchases for Bandcamp Friday3, then get back to writing this.
After what seems like a short time, I look up and see that it's midnight. I haven't gotten to the news links that I've accumulated. So be it. It's Shabbat. They can wait until later tomorrow, unless there are sirens in the morning.
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.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
L'hitraot.