December 12, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-11

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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After we light tonight's Hanukkah candles at the front of the office, the bosses summon us to the conference room. A cut-up strudel, apples, clementines, and persimmons are laid out on the big table, along with two boxes of dreidels¹ and other tops.

The bosses collect them. They have hundreds of them, from all over the world. One boss gives a brief lecture-demonstration about some of them, occasionally interrupted and corrected by the other.

A whole class of the tops have spherical bodies. When you spin them, they eventually flip over and spin on their handles. Others are round, made on lathes. One has rings on it, which appear to levitate as it spins.

A couple are built from cubes, with the handle sticking out of one corner. The boss points out how the top's spin seems to change direction, and asks who knows why. I do. It's relative to the current running the lights in the room. Or something like that.

WhatsApp messages from the family buzz in my pocket during the get-together. I check them when I'm back at my desk.

Earlier in the day, a couple of them travel by cab from the House of a Hundred Grandmothers to a clinic southeast of here, for optical appointments. The big IBM building they pass has our flag on it, three stories high.

They hear several booms while at the clinic. One feels the floor vibrate. The TV shows a missile attack in the area.

At least one rocket lands in the city where I used to rehearse.² Magen David Adom treats one man who was "lightly to moderately wounded."³

"Magen David Adom" translates to "Red Star of David." It's sort of like the Red Cross here, but also handles ambulances and the like. I've been very thankful for their services a couple of times.

Across the border, they have "Red Crescent." I wonder what Buddhist countries have. "Red Buddha" sounds familiar, but then I realize that that's a Stomu Yamash'ta album that I used to have.⁴

Even more parenthetically: Looking for the link to the news article about the wounded person, I discover that my main news source (other than my family) has a useful page on which it tracks both its own stories and others from news sources that they follow. Quite surprising and pleasing to see.⁵

Where was I? I scroll back up in what I'm writing. Ah, my family's cab ride.

On their way home, the driver mentions seeing many missiles falling. Another relative, who also was seeing an optometrist in another town, says that she, too, heard quite a few booms. In my bubble of a city, I don't notice any.

Another thing that my relatives notice: while there's normally a lot of construction going on in the area between here and the clinic, they don't see any cranes that appear to be doing anything.

At the beginning of the war, construction came to a standstill around here. It hasn't picked up much. The construction sector has a lot of Arab workers. Some of them aren't being allowed over the Green Line⁶ to come to work.⁷ Unemployment among those on this side of the line has increased at three times the rate of unemployment among Jewish workers.⁸ Many foreign workers in construction and agriculture have fled the country.

A meme that I've seen on Facebook reports what it claims is a miracle. The official name for our war is "The Iron Swords." Archaeologist have reported finding four iron swords from Roman times in the Ein Gedi Nature Preserve.⁹ Clearly, this must be a sign from above affirming that our iron swords will be victorious! Well, maybe. But the swords were found in June, and the publicity went out a month before the attack that began the war. A simpler explanation might be that the Army's public relations team, knowing of the discovery, referenced it in naming the war.

The Army has reported that seven more of our soldiers died in the war yesterday.¹⁰ One thing that stands out to me are their ages. Six of the seven were over thirty years old, reservists who had been brought back into the war.

There's now an official site where the Army is tracking casualties.¹¹ It's in Hebrew, but Google Translate handles it well. People wondering about the official numbers can follow it.

I stay at work for a while after returning to my desk, then head out. I realize that I don't have anything thawed for supper, so I stop at the usual café. (I pause while typing this to take some fish out of the freezer.)

I don't think I've ever seen the cashier at the counter. When I approach, she says, "Hi! You want sachlav, right?"

I don't, for once. I want an actual supper. I order the Balkan Bowl¹², with a large lemonade. And a donut.

The workers are completely thrown. "Not a sachlav?!" "I think I just died!" "Reality has broken!" The one who had already started pulling the elements together for the sachlav freezes in place. She looks like her CPU has crashed.¹³

They eventually recover. They do call me back to the counter while making the bowl, when they discover that they don't have any of the quinoa. They ask if rice would be OK. Yep.

The Balkan Bowl is larger than I remember. That's OK. I like it.

When I head back into the seating area, I find that someone has unplugged the ordering kiosk but left it right in the doorway. It takes me a few tries to fit my tray and myself in past it. A worker runs over and moves it out of the way, but only after I have already sat down.

As I start to eat, another WhatsApp message comes in. A coworker has sent the office group a video that he shot of the tops spinning in the conference room. I slow myself down and watch them spin as I eat.

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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.)

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

L'hitraot.