December 11, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-10

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 wake up to a man's voice repeatedly hollering my name. "Yosef!" It's coming in through the window. "Yosef!"

I stagger toward the voice. "Yosef! Where is your laundry?"

Now I recognize the voice. Oops. I yell back, "Just a minute!" I had tried to do too many things at once last night. I had put my laundry together, and even tied the bag up, but it's still at the foot of my bed.

I carry the bag to the front door and step outside with it, still wearing pajamas. I hand it to the laundry guy.

"What, you forgot?" he demands.

"Just to put it outside."

He grunts and lifts the bag onto his shoulder. "Fine. I'll bring it back tomorrow. If it rains, I'll put it upstairs under that roof." The landlords' porch is covered. In case of rain, we leave it there. Otherwise, we put it under a tree at the top of my stairs.

"Thank you," I say. "Have a good day."

He has already disappeared.

An SMS tells me that my annual pass to the country's national park system is being extended due to the war. The link takes me to a page that says, "There are times when even nature stands still."¹ It has the usual boilerplate thoughts and prayers for the victims, hostages, and soldiers, and the ubiquitous slogan, "Together, we will prevail."

I can't quite tell for how long they're extending the pass. I assume they'll let me know when it runs out. Since it only costs about as much as a couple of visits to the parks, I think it has already paid for itself in my small trips for my film project.

A traffic jam of baby carriages tangles up the elevators as I come in to work.

No one is waiting for the elevators as I enter the lobby. I walk over to the buttons and press "Up." A woman with a walker, much older than me, gets to the buttons a moment later. She pushes the button, too, even though it is already lit.

An elevator dings once. It's going up. Good. Elevators going down ring twice, the tones a major third apart. I stand just to the left of the doors, to let passengers getting out go first.

The doors open. After a moment, a dark blue baby carriage slowly emerges. The mother is making googly noises. I assume there's a baby inside.

Once she's out, another baby carriage follows, slightly smaller and grey. The mother moves slowly and keeps looking backward, as if she's worried that she's dropped something. She hasn't.

The doors start to close as she passes between them. She turns in my direction. I have to back up. I can't reach the buttons or the doors to stop them from closing. Neither can the woman with the walker.

The elevator leaves without us.

I press the button again when I can reach it. More people gather, including a mother with a double seater carriage.

The door to another elevator, the one farthest from me, dings. We all turn to face it. It's twice as large as the others, lined with something like wood to handle deliveries.

The people in front of me shuffle on. The mother with the double-wide carriage has trouble angling it to fit inside the door. After a few tries, she succeeds. As I try to get in, the doors close again, leaving me and the woman with the walker outside.

We push more buttons. More people gather. More elevators arrive, but they're all headed down.

The first elevator that we had missed returns and opens. It is headed up again. Using my best New York crowd ducking skills, I zoom ahead and in. More people zoom in behind me.

The woman with the walker almost makes it. I try to hit the "stay open" button, but the belly of another man, larger than I am, blocks it.

The doors close. I sigh. I hope the woman got upstairs sometime today.

The nation's universities announce that they have pushed the start of the academic year back again.² Rather than Christmas Eve, classes will start on New Year's Eve. I'm guessing that some rule somewhere states that school must start before the end of the academic year. It probably involves funding.

Fortunately, New Year's Eve isn't that big a holiday here, except, I think, in some Russian neighborhoods, where they call it "Sylvester."³ If I remember, I'll say more about it then.

I try again to make my way through the confusing thicket of the Cinematheque's website. I succeed this time. I manage to reserve a movie ticket. The year-long pass covers the cost.

Barring more things going wrong between now and then, on Thursday, I'll be seeing "Stop Making Sense." I last saw it in a theater on the weekend that it opened. It must have been someplace in New York City.

The Cinematheque is really nice. At the Beyoncé movie, the image was sharp, and the sound was clear. It's compact. The theater I was in has about 200 seats. I don't know how large the other one is. The seats are comfortable and steeply raked. Steps lead down from the doors in the back.

The only problem is that if people stand up, you can see the shadow of the top of their head at the bottom of the screen. I'll mention it to the staff, but it may be unavoidable. The theaters were built into an existing space under City Hall, so they may have been limited in the angles that they could use.

Around lunchtime, the government's official X account tweets a video of the freed hostages from my city.⁴ They speak of their time trapped across the border, about the hunger, the lack of knowledge, and their longing for their families. And they speak of how much they want their friend, kidnapped with them, to be set free.

Another freed hostage, the one whose grandfather lives in this city, posts a photo to Instagram.⁵ She was also kidnapped at the rave. She has gotten a tattoo with the date of the attack and the English words, "We will dance again."

An ultra-Orthodox site posts images of people at a school lighting a wall of menorahs, one for each hostage.⁶ It takes me a moment to decode the headline, since it uses the yeshivish mix of Hebrew and English particular to that community. The gallery shows the men standing in a line, each in identical black suits, white shirts without ties, and, except for a few, standard wide-brimmed black hats.

While we gather to light the Hanukkah candles at the office, a coworker launches into a dvar torah, a sermon-like lecture on the significance of the miracle at the core of the holiday. "We all know the miracle. What was the miracle? That the oil lasted for eight days rather than one? No, oil is oil. It burns as it burns. The miracle is that the one day stretched to the length of eight."

I have to speak up. "Yes, I have had days like that. Mostly waiting in line at government offices."

Once the candles are lit, we have chocolates, cheesecake, and fresh-baked cookies from the more commercial bakery at the Heart of the City.

My boss was out of the office for part of the afternoon, so I guess he got them then. He may even have checked the great donut place in the complex. I suspect that the line may have been too long for him to want to wait during work hours.

When I leave work, I think of going there and waiting in line for a donut. I talk myself out of it. I have already had a white chocolate cookie and a piece of cheesecake. I head home, where healthier food awaits.

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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.