Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-04
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...
I walk to the clinic in the light morning rain. Once inside, I juggle my wallet, health plan card, and water bottle.
Lightning crashes. I'm caught by surprise. My bottle falls to the floor.
I pick it up. Water flows from a crack on the bottom. It pools by my feet. My usual instantaneous reaction to crisis kicks in. I stand there and stare blankly at the bottle.
A woman comes in from the stairway. She speaks in Philippine-accented English: "It broken. Turn upside-down and no spill." I do. She walks on.
I dump the rest of the water outside and drop the bottle in the trash. It's a shame. It was a good bottle. I'll miss it. I hope to get another one like it next time I'm at the mall. Not tonight, though. I have a rehearsal.
I walk back to the elevator and scan the listing to find the eye clinic. I realize that having the water break on the way there is less urgent than if water would break for someone headed to, say, obstetrics.
The nurse gives me a standard eye test. It uses numbers, not letters. That makes sense. A significant number of patients might know the names of the letters in one of Hebrew, English, Arabic, Russian, or Amharic, but not in the other languages.
I ask if I can do it in English, since I seem to lock up on numbers and math things in Hebrew. She says that's OK.
A few lines in, though, I realize that I have switched back to Hebrew. I'm also oddly certain of what the numbers are before my eyes have focused in on the smaller ones.
After a while, I realize what's happening. As I proceed from one number to the next, the nurse is speaking the new number in Hebrew under her breath. I'm picking up on that.
I ace the vision test, but I'm not sure that it's meaningful, given the unintentional cheating.
I tell her that she had been speaking the numbers and that I could hear her. "Really? I am speaking them?" Yep. "And you could hear me?" Yep. "Oh! I will have to try not to do that. But now you have passed a hearing test, too!"
On the way to work, I stop into something like a dollar store. I'm looking for a small broom and dustpan, so I can sweep things from lunch off my desk.
I don't know the words for "broom" and "dustpan." The worker doesn't know the English words that I use.
I take out my phone and enter the two words in English. It gives me Hebrew words. When the worker shows me what I'm asking her for, I realize that Google Translate is wrong again. "Broom" is right, but for "dustpan," it gave me a word for a cooking pan.
I look up "dustpan," so I can get a picture. I do. When I click through, it shows me a sales page in Hebrew. The word that I need is "ya'eh".1 They don't have what I need.
Walking out of the store, a song from the Passover Seder loops in my head, "Ki lo na'eh, ki lo ya'eh."2 I look it up. The word "ya'eh" there is unrelated and spelled differently.
Hebrew has, in most people's pronunciation, two different silent letters, alef and ayin. In some pronunciations, such as Yemenite, the ayin is a guttural sound that I can't replicate. It's common in Arabic. The name "Gaza" begins with it, so English makes it into a "G," but in most Hebrew pronunciation that I hear, it's silent.
So "ya'eh", meaning "dustpan" uses the ayin. In the song, meaning "befitting", it uses the alef. If I swap them, though, I get the lyric, "Because for him, it is proper, because he has a dustpan." And that might be silly enough to help me remember.
My family tells me that some of the evacuees from the war who were moved to the House of a Hundred Grandmothers are planning to stay. They already have children in town, and like the lifestyle at the House.
I get a WhatsApp message forwarded from my family's rabbi. The religious education system here in town needs funding. A lot of things do.
The government (haphazardly and inadequately) and self-organizing citizens did a lot to fund these and other efforts early in the war. It's gone on, however, longer than any declared war in our history since the War of Independence 75 years ago. People and organizations are getting tapped out.
I'm seeing calls for more funding in a lot of areas. The government is looking to shift and increase revenues, but appear to be doing it in the worst ways that they can. The cuts are hitting those who need it most, affecting health care, senior care, support for minority communities, and care for those who are already poor.
My family sends me a firehose of articles exposing this. With the current crop of corrupt incompetents in charge of government ministries with which they have no experience, it isn't going well. I know of efforts among communities to try to help each other, and of philanthropists who are doing what they can, but it's a large and growing problem.
Meanwhile, our Minister of National Security and Master of Disguises has told the Wall Street Journal that "Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to Hamas. If Trump was in power, the US conduct would be completely different."3 Great. Trump has already said that if he were in charge, none of this would have happened, and, if elected, he'll clear it up right away. OK.
Meanwhile, the Army and other forces are actively working to try to keep the Minister's mobs from causing more trouble to the east.4 And more sensible ministers (granted, that doesn't take much) are saying and tweeting that his statement is "a direct blow to Israel's international status."5
In the evening, I rehearse a piece of mine over Zoom with members of a vocal ensemble in California. I had written the piece in the 80s and recorded it in the 90s in Hebrew. We're now looking at expanding it to include Arabic and English.
All sorts of interesting questions arise, including intelligibility, appropriateness, appropriation, political bias, and accessibility. All these questions are as important as the strictly musical ones. And the process by which we adapt the text and develop the music is at least as essential as how it sounds.
During the rehearsal, it's raining in most of the places from which the other members have connected. As several of us mention, it's good to hear the quality of the rain from their individual spaces. I'm glad, though, that at the moment, it isn't raining here.
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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.