October Mid-Month Report: Being Together

An update from day 375 and some literary things

For new subscribers: On the first of each month, I put out a newsletter with book recommendations, literary events and resources and more. Here’s the Oct 1 newsletter if you missed it. Since October 7, 2023, I’ve also been putting out mid-month updates with reflections from life in Israel, as well as some literary things. (Scroll down for the literary things).

Dear friends,

I woke up on the morning of October 8, after a day of mourning, after a sleepless night, with one thought. The only thing that's holding us back from falling into the abyss, the only thing that is helping me – helping all of us? – keep our s*** together, is BEING TOGETHER.

After our powerful Literary Modiin event last week,* a friend and fellow writer wrote to me. "Sending hugs because that's all I have right now."

I responded, "Indeed. Hugs and being together."

(Click below to watch a recording…including beautiful, poignant poems by Yonatan Berg, Hadassa Tal, and Hanna Yerushalmi, testimony from Hannah Wacholder Katsman, whose son Hayim was killed on Oct 7th in Kibbutz Holit, essays by Joanna Chen and Caroline Goldberg Igra, and two literary projects (among many) happening right now via Hadassa Ben Ari, The Heroes of Oct 7th (a book for children) and Ephrat Huss (an ongoing project of creative writing at Ben Gurion University for solider-students)).

Being together, for me, means all sorts of things, in no apparent order:

• As I've written before, it's about the many moments in the past year when I've met Jews and some non-Jews from all over Israel and all over the world who have come to volunteer in our agricultural sector. It's playing my Israeli playlist with Mexican Jews in an orange grove and listening to a shiur with women all in skirts while we pick olives. It's meeting Birthright groups and bumping into kids of friends while picking tomatoes or apricots, and taking visiting family and friends to pick avocados or grapefruit or cherry tomatoes or to pack herbs.

• Being together is showing up week after week at my beloved shul, where we catch up on each others' news, especially whose kids are serving where, listening with bowed heads as the names of the hostages are read, and praying with all our hearts and melodies for our people and our embattled land. Being together is raising our voices together, on regular Shabbatot and the holidays, and beseeching God to please, please, please show us mercy. As we just sang in Avinu Malkenu, תְּהֵא הַשָּׁעָה הַזֹּאת שְׁעַת רַחֲמִים וְעֵת רָצוֹן מִלְּפָנֶֽיךָ - let this hour be an hour of compassion and a time of favor before You.

• Being together is coming to literary spaces – virtual, like Literary Modiin, to offer support and celebrate new books in the Jewish world, and in person when possible. I’ve been blessed this year to attend the Jerusalem Writers’ Festival in May and Creative Writing Conference at Bar Ilan University, in memory of Founding Director Shaindy Rudoff, z’’l, in June. Sometimes being together just means a meet-up with my fellow writers – for lunch, for a drink, for a get-together in my garden. These things give me strength.

• Being together means squeezing into our safe room. Over the course of the last year, when the rare sirens in Modiin have gone off (though this past month, five times, not so rare), we’ve huddled in our safe room with whoever is home — once a group of my girlfriends over for a drink, once my son's friends, and most recently with friends from the neighborhood who were in the park across the street and ran over. And being together is the checking in (and jokes) in our whatsapp groups, the discussion of which snacks are best to have on hand.

  

  Safe-room selfies. Left pic: the Iranian attack on Oct 1. Nerve-wracking especially until my daughter (who was driving at the time) arrived. Massive booms and non-stop sirens for an hour. Middle and right: "Just" another missile from the Houtis, the following week, on Oct 7. Bamba helps, and Joey enjoys having everyone up on the bed with him.

• Being together is the happiness at a wedding or bat mitzvah, or the sense of community at a funeral or a shiva. From the unadulterated joy of dancing together and singing with all our hearts at s’machot (happy occasions) to the comfort in standing with our neighbors to pay tribute to the fallen or the logistics of organizing food for a shiva and knowing the community will provide. Being together means driving far distances (as I did yesterday) to be at a beautiful bat mitzvah, where, as the mother of the bat mitzvah girl was speaking, sirens were going off all over Israel (but miraculously not where we were in Zichron Yaacov) and we could hear the Iron Dome doing its work. (Mazal tov, Lilach!) Being together means hugging our friends at that same bat mitzvah who’d just lost a young soldier from their community in the Hezbollah drone attack on the army base near Binyamina the day before.

• Being together is the continued practice to meet a friend for a drink or for coffee or to walk the dogs or to go on a bike ride. Continuing to do the things we did before, a night out in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, a night in Modiin in someone’s garden, and so on.

• Being together is having all my kids at home for Shabbat (which hasn't happened since May, hopefully this will happen at some point in November)!

• Being together means gathering on Saturday nights to hear the stories of the hostages. This hasn't happened in Modiin in a month or two, for a variety of reasons.

• Being together means attending ceremonies – Israelis are so very, very good at ceremonies. And though, for the most recent ceremony, put on by the bereaved and hostage families on October 7th, I watched alone in my kitchen, tears streaming down my cheeks for two hours, I felt together with my people, and I stood and sang Hatikvah at the end.

For all of these and more, I am so grateful. Writing these brief updates for the last year has also been my way of processing. Endless gratitude towards you, dear friends and readers, for “being together” with me in this space. (I’ve now passed 1,400 subscribers - thank you!)

The Families Ceremony

Wow. Just wow. So far I’ve only seen a small part of it translated into English, and I hope more of it will be. The ceremony was incredibly unifying and powerful. From the rabbi who lost two of his sons on October 7th reciting the Yizkor poem to the young widow, married only one month when her husband was killed at the Nova, to the bereaved grandmother who lost her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, to the widow of a police officer, to the two widows, Druze and Jewish, who appeared together as their husbands had been friends in the army, and to the sister of the Muslim paramedic who was killed at the Nova – each story has left a mark on me. By design, the ceremony did not have any politicians, and not one politician's name was mentioned. Interspersed with all of these difficult stories, many of Israel's leading musicians performed, from the old guard of Shalom Hanoch and Yehuda Poliker to the newer generation of Agam Buhbut and Ran Dankner. Shlomo Artzi appeared at the end, together with Yagil Yaakov, 13, who was captured from his home at Kibbutz Nir Oz and held hostage for 52 days until he was released. Hamas still holds the body of Yagil's father Yair Yaakov. The most political any of the speeches got were calls for a national inquiry.

If you're only going to watch one speech — if you’re going to click on one link in this newsletter — please watch the speech at the very end, by Yonatan Shamriz, one of the organizers of the ceremony, who managed in the depths of his pain to convey some hope for the future. Yonatan is the older brother of Alon Shamriz z"l (who was a friend of my daughter's). In one of the lowest points in our very low year, Alon was mistakenly killed by the IDF along with two other hostages, Yotam Haim and Samar Talalka, may their memories be a blessing.

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I’m writing this from the airport in Larnaca, Cyprus, en route to the US for some happy family occasions (Mazal tov Leor! Mazal tov Carly!). Hoping to finish before my battery dies. Halavai that by the time I return home, or by the time I send my November newsletter, or by the time we bring in the holiday tomorrow, our hostages will be home, the fighting will have subsided, and the healing will have begun.

Additional resources and reading:

Brother of hostage shot dead by IDF: There is no personal example, no leadership, but we will rebuild (Jessica Steinberg’s report of Yonatan Shamriz’s speech)

Daniel Gordis' Israel From the Inside - Highlights from Families Ceremony (translated into English including Yonatan Shamriz’s speech)

Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg’s interview with Yonit Levi on Channel 12 (in English)

Losing and Finding Amir Sekori (by Marla Braverman)

In the End, We're Just Regular People with Protheses (interview in Hebrew with Ari Spitz

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Literary Matters

What I’m reading

Listening to Yael Van Der Wouden’s The Safekeep. Just finished Skippy Dies by Paul Murray and Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (fast-paced but maybe not the best thing to read before boarding three flights?)…Just started Dana Spiotta’s Wayward. Lots of books waiting for me in America, hooray! Look for my reviews in my Nov. 1 newsletter.

Upcoming Events

• Nov 10 at 20:00 Israel time / 1 pm Eastern: Literary Modiin’s November event with Sarah Seltzer (THE SINGER SISTERS) and Talia Carner (THE BOY WITH THE STAR TATTOO). Register here.

• Nov 17: The 2024 Jew­ish Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence, spon­sored by the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil, is open for registration. The conference is virtual, and will take place from 10 am - 5 pm Eastern time.

• Nov 18, 19 & 20 at 19:00 Israel time / 12 pm Eastern: Several sessions as part of the JBC conference, free and open to the public. I’ll be speaking on Nov. 20 at the panel entitled “Why is This War Dif­fer­ent from All Oth­er Wars: Writ­ing About Israel After Octo­ber 7th,” together with Deb­o­rah Har­ris, Gali­na Vromen, and Miryan Sivan. Register for one or all three here.

• Save the dates for upcoming Literary Modiin events - Sunday December 15 and Sunday January 19! Missed any of our Literary Modiin events? Catch the recordings here.

I’ll end with some nice news for me: I have a new Jeremiah story that was accepted for publication and I can’t wait to share it with you all!

Wishing you a חג שמח chag sameach (happy Sukkot holiday), שנה יותר טובה shana yoter tova (a better year) and שנה נחמה shana nechama (a year of comfort). May we see our hostages homes immediately, and may the next few weeks be quiet ones.

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A small way to support my work: Since June 2019, I’ve hosted the monthly Literary Modiin author series, and since April 2020, I’ve been putting out this monthly newsletter. Both represent a significant amount of effort for me, but I love talking about books and promoting other authors, and I’m committed to keeping both of these things FREE for all. I do incur some expenses to keep these up, however, so if you have enjoyed the Literary Modiin events and/or if you enjoy the newsletter or both, and you’d like to support my work in some small, tangible way, I’d be grateful if you’d click on the “Buy Me a Coffee” link below. (If you can’t, that’s fine too)! I appreciate your continued support for these events, book recommendations and my literary musings.

Request: If you’ve read (and liked) The Book of Jeremiah, please help me out by writing a brief review on Amazon or wherever you purchase books online. It can be as simple as one or two lines. Thank you! 

Julie Zuckerman's debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, was published in May 2019 by Press 53. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in CRAFT, Tikkun, Jewish Women’s Archives, Crab Orchard Review, The Coil, The SFWP Quarterly, Ellipsis, MoonPark Review, Sixfold, and The MacGuffin, among others. She is the founder and host of Literary Modiin, a monthly author series celebrating fiction, memoir and poetry with Jewish content. A native of Connecticut, she lives in Israel with her husband and four children. www.juliezuckerman.com