January 16, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-15

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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Pulling back

In the morning, I'm asked how I keep going with these posts. I say that, for one thing, I try to find something funny each day. They ask me how I could find anything funny during a war. I tell them about the guy with the umbrella yesterday. They say, "Yes. Perhaps. A man handing you an umbrella isn't necessarily funny. But the way you tell it, it's funny." I guess that's a vote of confidence.

That said, I'm planning to pull back a bit on these posts. My plan was to keep going as I have throughout the war. All the wars that I have been aware of before had lasted a few weeks at most.

This has now gone on for more than a hundred days. Government people yesterday said that it would probably last more than a year.

I'm tired. These posts have been taking me three hours or more every day. I don't have the energy to do both this and my day job indefinitely.

So I'm going to trim things down somewhat. I expect to do less of the general news, except for when it affects my city or me. There will probably be fewer footnotes. Some days, I may just do a paragraph or two.

What really keeps me going is hearing back from folks who are reading it. The Facebook interface doesn't handle expressing multiple emotions well. Where (as so often happens) posts include things that are both happy and sad, being limited to one emoji gets tricky.

I'm interesting in knowing what you particularly value, enjoy, or are informed or moved by in these posts. That will help me focus on what people find most beneficial in reading them.

Huge thanks to those of you who have been commenting, either in email and messages or openly on Facebook. And I realize that most people don't comment when reading things,¹ so I'm not frowning at the rest of you.

That said, I'm on vacation this week, so I can still ramble a bit. (And down in the last section, there's some solid news.)

Shopping: the inner layer

The day as a whole goes pretty slowly, but I get a lot done. I finally do some clothing shopping that I had put off.

I had been told to check a certain shop for underwear in the size and style that I like. They're friends of the family. I know what block they were on, but don't recognize the store. I ask a relative on WhatsApp who describes it for me. I send a photo of the shop that I think is the one he's describing. It is.

The store doesn't have a sign. The display window and racks outside only have women's clothing. I go inside.

The shopkeeper is helping another customer. There's barely space for the three of us. Everything appears to be strewn about.

The other customer is paying for a few items. The shopkeeper wants to sell her something else. She says that she can't afford it now. He says that she can get it and pay him later. He'll remember. She declines.

I've been standing quietly. He looks at me a bit suspiciously. I ask if this is the store I'm looking for, asking for it by the family's name. He says, "Yes..."

I tell him that my family had told me to come here. He brightens. "You're the uncle! I haven't seen you in a long time! Are you visiting again?" I think I had just met him once, at a wedding over six years ago. But most of my family have the same kind of face, with or without beards. I've even been mistaken for my in-laws.

We exchange pleasantries. I tell him that I live here now. He asks sternly why I haven't been to his store before. I tell him the truth. I couldn't find or recognize it. He hands me his card. "Here, now you have the address."

I tell him I'm looking for underwear. He asks me what kind. I had planned ahead. I show him a picture that I had taken Saturday night. A relative had shown me what he had gotten, which was just what I wanted. I had snapped a picture of one pair of underwear, laid out flat, and the box that it came in.

He scans his shelves then pulls what looks like a plastic trash bag from under a rack. He opens it. It contains several boxes of the underwear. He figures that I'm the largest size. I get several pairs.

Shopping: the outer layer

I also need to get jeans. I go down the block to another store. Most shops don't have my size of much of anything. This store does. I had finally asked one of the heaviest men in my office where he gets his clothes. He told me to go to this shop.

The owner appears to be doing his books, or something like that, when I get there. He is standing in front of a low rack. Various papers, receipts, and cash are scattered on top of it. He is muttering as he works on it.

He looks up as I come in. The non-stop stream of speech gets slightly louder. He's welcoming me.

I tell him that I'm shopping for jeans. He shoves the stuff from the top of the rack into a plastic bag that once held a dress shirt, and grabs a tape measure. He measures my waist. It isn't easy. I'm large enough that he effectively has to hug me tight to get the tape all the way around.

He turns to the shelf of jeans. Styles, colors, and sizes are randomly mixed in piles on it. He pulls out something that might fit and measures its waist. He doesn't trust the size numbers attached to them. He hands me one, and shows me where the dressing room is. It's at the back, about the size of a phone booth.

I go in and try the jeans on. They're just a bit too small. I come out and tell him. He flips through the other jeans and finds something larger. His muttered monologue never stops.

I try them on. They feel perfect. I end up getting three pairs, plus a belt. While I still have the first pair on, he marks the proper length.

I pay for them. The price is reasonable. I ask him when they would be ready. I figure it might be a week or so. "Come back in an hour, an hour and a half. I'll have them ready."

I head out. It's lunchtime. I see a burger joint that I hadn't seen before. I think it's where the place that had the Che Guevara shakshuka used to be.

I step up to the counter and order a burger and fries. I forget that locals pronounce "burger" as "boorgehr." I say it as in English. The worker responds in English. She's quite friendly. I feel less embarrassed than I otherwise might in asking her what some of the words on the menu mean.

The burger is quite good, better and cheaper than the place I had been going to. And they're open late. I'll be back.

I kill some more time looking in other shops. I realize that chaos is standard here. Many of them are only large enough for one or two customers, and have their merchandise arbitrarily stuffed on shelves. You have to ask for what you're looking for. Most of the shopkeepers know the customers by name.

The odd thing is that this is just a couple of blocks from where I usually shop. West of the City Square, everything is neatly organized in shiny, spacious stores. Here, on the East Side, two blocks and a century away, I might as well be in a different city. My mother had felt comfortable shopping here when she visited. I now know why. The stores here are like where her family shopped when she was a child in Philadelphia in the 1930s.

I meander back to the shop at about 12:30. The owner looks up. "Oh, great that you have come back. You know that we close in the afternoon?" I had forgotten. The small shops all close on Monday afternoons so the owners can run around and do business with each other.

He lifts a pile of clothes off of a chair and dumps it on another pile. "Here, just a minute, I'll be back." He heads out of the store, across the street, and around the corner, out of sight. I'm there alone. There's cash on the counter. A lot seems to happen on a basis of trust.

He comes back a few minutes later. "I'm sorry, I don't have it. The person who does the alterations lives over there, and he wasn't home. It gets tricky. They have a lot of kids. The clothes are ready, but I couldn't get at them. Could you come back tomorrow morning? I should be here. If I'm not, you can go over to his house and get them. He knows that you've already paid. Here, I'll write down my phone number and his phone number. What's your phone number? I'll write it down so I can call you. I'm sorry. Tomorrow will be OK? Good!" He gives me his card, with the tailor's name and number written on the back.

I leave. He turns back to his paperwork. I can still hear his endless flow of murmuring as I head out the door.

The terrorists next door

I come home, make some coffee, and doze off at the computer. I'm awakened by WhatsApp messages from the family. There's been a terrorist attack in the next town over.

I go to the news sites. Word comes in gradually, first from the local sites² and then the national.³ Cars have rammed into pedestrians. The drivers have gotten out of the cars and stabbed people, then stolen other cars and continued. They've been captured alive and are being interrogated.

I follow the news until I have to head out again. I have a doctor's appointment at 4:10.

I walk over the clinic. I get there in plenty of time. When I scan my card upstairs in the doctors' area, the system doesn't know of my appointment. I stand there, mumbling and confused.

My dietitian comes up the stairs and sees me there. "We don't have another appointment now, do we?"

"No, I have an appointment with a different doctor, but the machine doesn't think so."

"What's your doctor's name?" It takes me a moment to remember and tell her. My memory often locks up when I'm upset.

"She's not coming in, I think. She's on the other side of the bridge from the attack, and they've blocked it off."

"What do I do now?"

"Go down to the main desk and confirm it. I may be wrong. And they can reschedule you."

I go back down. I have to scan my card again downstairs to get a number to wait for the main desk, so I can ask them why scanning my card upstairs didn't work.

They call my number quickly. I try to put the words together to tell the worker what the problem is. I fail. I show her the appointment on my phone.

"Your appointment was canceled. We called you two hours ago to tell you." I hadn't heard anything from them. I check my phone. I had received neither a phone call nor a text message. I'm not pleased.

"She had to cancel. She's on the other side of the attack. Shall I set a new appointment for you?" OK. I get one for a week from today.

I go to the usual cafe, across the street, to calm down. My dietitian had told me not to get sachlav as often. Damn the torpedoes. I need a sachlav.⁴

At home, I follow the news sites and get more information. A reporter announces that seventeen people were injured. One died. The reporter is standing at the hospital where I had stayed several years ago.

I ask my family if they know of any details. One relative reports that he saw a map on one of the news channels showing where the three attacks were. One was about a twenty-minute walk from here, around the corner from the movie theater in the strip mall and the kalamansi trees. The bridge between here and there had been cordoned off.

Reports from around the world come streaming in, posted at different times from different places. I see local news,⁵ ABC in New York,⁶ Forbes,⁷ Sky News,⁸ AFP,⁹ France 24 English,¹⁰, Deutsche Welle,¹¹ Al-Jazeera,¹² and the Hindustan Times.¹³ (All the news clips but the first are in English.)

Our mayor announces increased security in our city. Google Translate says:

"According to the guidelines, the security patrols around all educational institutions and construction sites will be increased, the instructions to the guards and security personnel will be sharpened, police checkpoints will be placed at the entrances to the city and central neighborhoods, the neighborhood guards will increase their patrols and the security camera command and the municipal call center 106 will operate with increased force."¹⁴

Late in the evening, my family sends me news that literally hits closer to home. The woman who was killed¹⁵ was the social worker at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers when my family moved in.

I sit and stare at the screen. There's nothing I can do but write this up. I guess I picked the wrong day to stop doing long posts.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.