Friends with Words is a newsletter about language, culture, and identity, created by a Russian-born, Israel-based writer, linguist, and single mom.
It's for people who believe that curiosity can heal the world or, at least, make it a slightly less horrible place.
A siren sounded one morning at 7:30 am when I was already in a coffee shop, working. I grabbed my laptop, put it in my bag, left my coffee cup and my water bottle on the table, dialed Maya while getting up and following the café owner and his wife…
“Where do we go?” asked the only other customer…
“The building next door…” they said.
We go out and walk towards the building next door…
“Do you get panic attacks?” asks the owner’s wife, seeing me hyperventilating. “Everything is ok,” she adds…
Everybody was super calm… people outside didn’t even run, just kept going about their business, most cars didn’t bother stopping…
“No,” I said, “I’m just worried about my daughter, she’s waiting for her school bus outside… ”
Maya wasn’t answering… The building next door was closed… the coffee shop owner and his wife shrugged and went back to the coffee shop, back to their coffee machines. I went back inside too, but didn’t sit back at my table, which was too close to the window…
Finally, my son answered the phone: “Mom, she’s with me.”
Phew. She hadn’t gone out yet. Or maybe she did and came back. I could breathe again.
She cried that she didn’t wanna go to school. I said, “It’s fine, it’s nothing, you know that we’re ok, that you’re never far from a shelter” (our definition of safety these days).
I tried to channel the calm coffee shop owner who shrugged, just moments ago, “It’s not like we aren’t used to it…” But it didn’t do anything. She didn’t want to go to school.
Her bus aide called a few minutes later. She had to stop and take the kids who were already on the bus to the nearest building. I told her that Maya didn’t want to go to school, and I didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t force her if she’s scared,” she said. She offered to go up to our apartment door and pick her up from there. But that didn’t help. No school today.
Katyushas
Gili, the coach at my functional workout studio, says she isn’t bothered by sirens. She says, “I grew up with Katyushas.”
"Katyushas” (the Soviet-developed rocket launcher) were used by various Lebanese factions against Israel in the First Lebanon War.
“Katyusha” is also a diminutive/endearing form of the Russian name “Katya.” -Usha (or sometimes -ushka) is a diminutive suffix that is sometimes added to personal names and nouns in Russian (as in “Mayusha” or “Babushka”). It makes them sound little and cute, and/or dearly loved.
Like a little girl or a beloved girlfriend / grandmother.
Or a deadly weapon.
Gili grew up in Nahariya, a seaside town up north, 10km south of the Lebanese border. She says there were no sirens back then. Instead, a truck would drive by in your neighborhood announcing on the loudspeaker that a rocket attack is likely to happen in their area.
Then they’d run to the shelter. Not a safe room like we have right in our apartment, but a shelter in the basement of their building….
She was seven, eight, nine… a bit younger than my daughter now.
“There were these bunk beds for kids there, and tons of board games, so we just had fun times, and our parents sat outside on chairs…” she adds, “It’s not even some kind of traumatic memory, it was just something we did.”
But then somebody from her grade got killed by a shell from a rocket while running on the beach.
Sand surfing
Then there was Mor, a woman who was one of my mom’s caregivers last year. Mor was an evacuee from Sderot, a city in the south. “I’m not going back there even if they paid me ten million shekels,” she told me when we first met.
In the south, they had regular rocket attacks, on and off, for years, long before the current war. There were periods in which there were several attacks a day, every day. The attacks were so routine that they barely even made it into the local news.
Whatever you were doing — sleeping, pooping, eating, making love — you had to be ready to get up and run.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You start throwing up your food.”
On the morning of October 7th, she was in the shower when her daughter noticed masked terrorists in the bushes across the road. She ran out (not because of the terrorists but because the sirens started just then) and within seconds, a grenade was thrown into the small window of the bathroom.
She couldn’t take a shower for several weeks after that.
My son went to Sderot recently, as part of a school trip. They visited the town’s police station, which was hit especially hard on October 7th, and met with a young paramedic who was there on that day, helping treat the wounded and fighting.
(When I was his age, we visited Auschwitz. And I thought that was hard.)
After that, they went sand surfing in the desert like normal 16-year-olds.
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