Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2025-06-17
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...
The cleaner knocks, as usual, at about 7:30 AM, and then walks right in. I'm ready. She used to show up at different times on different Tuesdays, but it threw me off. I wouldn't know when to go down to breakfast. Our head of personnel at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers arranged that the cleaner would always show up between about 7 and 7:30. I think she now consistently comes to my apartment first.
She calls out "Good day!" with a big smile. I spin around at my desk and walk to the front door. "How are you?" I ask. "Praise God," she replies. In Arabic, as she says it, "Alhamdulilah," or in Hebrew, "Baruch haShem," it's a standard response when things aren't going perfectly, but you don't want to complain.
I apologize for the state of the apartment: "Pardon me. Everything's messier than usual, more jumbled than usual." She says it's OK and gets to work. There's a younger cleaner with her, who I don't think I've seen before. I think she's in training.
When they need to clean around my desk, I go to my bed and lie down. I actually slept there for all of last night, when I could. We had two alarms: One at a bit after midnight, with the now-usual pre-alert, and another at about 3:30 AM, without the tchoketa overture. The usual gang of neighbors gathered in the hall each time. There was a bit of conversation, then quiet. I think we're all learning how to awaken just enough to get out into the hallway, then doze off until the all-clear.
Weird nightmares also awakened me, as tends to happen on nights when we're not actually dodging missiles. In one, I was helping the cast of Glee install Linux on an ancient Mac, though the scene morphed into the Twin Peaks Red Room. In the other, a bus driver in a part of Brooklyn that I often dream about but which doesn't exist attempted to talk me into a fraudulent movie deal. When I pointed out that every single bit of the deal presented a different red flag, he tried to run me down with the bus. I woke up.
The cart with breakfast and supper comes by at about 8:30 AM. The Head of Marketing is helping out, along with the usual server. I juggle a plate full of vegetables, cheeses, warm hard-boiled eggs, and other items, and come back inside.
I finish the paragraph that I'm writing and step into the kitchen. An alert sounds.
(A word that I learn later, in the hallway: while an alarm is an "azakah," an alert is a "hatra'ah." I also discover that Google Translate thinks that both English words become "hatra'ah," which made last night's post confusing to someone who read it through that app.)
I have enough time to pour a cup of cold brew and step out into the hall, right when we hear the missile alarm. Everyone else shows up within a few seconds. The crew with the breakfast cart have just served the last room along the hall. They deftly make their way back to the other end, squeezing past the array of residents' walkers.
We hear the loudest booms ever. The building shakes. A shockwave of air comes in from an open door far down the hall. No one budges. We know that we're in the safest place possible.
One resident needs to go to the bathroom. Her caregiver isn't around. I can't help with this. Another woman, older, more frail, in a thin housecoat and without teeth, accompanies her in, and, later, back.
In Continual Care, people in the common room move to the safest spaces. Some line up along an inner wall. On the windows on the outer walls, the shockwave shakes the curtains.
After a few minutes, the voice of the CEO comes over the intercom: crisp, precise, and yet comforting. All clear. We can go back to our apartments.
Word flies around media, social and otherwise, about impacts in our town. There aren't any serious injuries. A missile in an open parking lot has set an empty bus on fire. Word has it that a relatively new eight-floor apartment tower has taken a direct hit. It hasn't, but a missile that has landed in an open field has damaged some residences.
There are photos, but I can't tell where they are by looking at them. A lot of new buildings have gone up since I'm moved here, most of them sharing the same post-Brutalist black and white design, like crude Imperial Stormtroopers’ helmets made of Lego. A street sign in one photo of the bus lot shows that it isn't the one near me.
The municipal WhatsApp group shares a picture of missile debris on the ground. It warns us not to approach or touch it. It says not to come and rubberneck at the impact site, since onlookers get in the way of rescue services. Later, international TV news clips show interviews with people who have come there anyway.
A relative needs to get to his daughter, who is about to go into labor, His son-in-law is currently deployed in Gaza. His wife is going to their apartment to pick up some things. Their shelter is near enough that she can drive to it in time if we get a pre-alarm alert.
Her daughter stays with friends as she goes to the apartment. The child's Zoom classes for the day have been canceled, but the mother got her some new coloring books and crayons yesterday. The stress is triggering the mother's fibromyalgia, but the child appears content. She’s spending the day watching webcasts from the Philharmonic.
Social media reports that the city kennel had been impacted have been deleted. Apparently, they felt the shock wave, but the dogs and people are fine, and don't need help. We're proud to see that the local news site's article saying that they're OK arbitrarily uses a photo of a relative's happy dog.
Home Front Command announces that it will be stopping the alert before the alert before the alarm. The single alert some ten minutes before the alarm will continue, but they don't consistently know about attacks far enough ahead of time to trigger the one before it. People (including me) have been getting confused as to which is which.
The municipal WhatsApp group says that Home Front Command has changed the long-standing rule that we can leave the shelters ten minutes after the alarms stop sounding. We now have to wait for an official all-clear. I understand that the Iranian missiles are faster and sneakier than what had been thrown at us before.
We get two alerts, one right after another, at about 5 PM. It's the end of my online Hebrew lesson. We know that we have a few minutes, so we finish up calmly. We go over the day's new vocabulary. Rather than using a textbook, we talk about our lives and note the new words that come up: interception, refinery, life expectancy, ear plugs. We go over the words for fractions, powers, and "square root" as I explain how shockwaves travel from explosion sites.
When the alarm goes off, I take my coffee and my kitchen chair to the hallway. Most of the usual residents join me there. One who rarely comes out of her room wanders out and drifts down the hall. Her caregiver is elsewhere. I try to explain to the resident that she should remain in our hallway. "Don't bother," another neighbor says. "Her mind's not really here."
After the official all-clear, I head down to Continual Care and check in on family. I help out as I can, moving items around and fetching medications. The staff knows me by now.
One nurse stops by and hands me my stick of daily medicines. "You haven't brought your empty one down yet." She's right. I tell her that I'll bring it down in a little while. When I'm done in Continual Care, I go to my room, scoop up the empty stick, and bring it back down.
Supper is one of my favorites: sabich, a pita stuffed with eggplant, hard-boiled egg, hummus, and who knows what else. There are other vegetables and light dairy items to go with it.
As I eat, I see my cold brew coffee maker, and realize that I haven't set it up. It's supposed to brew overnight and then decant in the morning. Mine is getting old and slow and takes several hours to finish that last stage. I usually set it up around lunchtime, then trigger it to drip out when I go to bed. I haven't done that this time.
I get up and pour in the coffee (the pre-fab 85 gram packets from the store work perfectly) and the carafe of water. I find myself thinking that I'll set it to decant after the three or four AM missile alarm. I can't necessarily plan on there being one, but the odds are good.
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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.
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L'hitraot.