Last week, on Tuesday, D. and I attended a quiet memorial for George Floyd. Out of blue, an alert blasted in every cellphone, with the words: Curfew at 11 p.m.
We looked at each other with amazement. D. is Israeli, we have lived through many sirens and alerts, but this was the first time the two categories collided. We understood that the sad silence in our neighborhood's park is not indicative of the overall situation in other parts of the city.
On my way home I got messages from friends asking me if I went to the demonstrations, warning me of the large police presence on a certain street and a certain neighborhood.
At home, I watched the news. The images seemed to be taken right out of a movie: flames, tear gas, and clashes between protesters and cops.
It was as if the helicopters were hovering right over my home. And then I realized that the noise I was hearing was in fact from my window. This was the soundtrack of the disaster movies on New York I watched in my childhood in Haifa, New York of 9/11 that I saw from a friend's home in Tel Aviv. It was suddenly very real.
The following day, the mayor announced that the curfew would continue until Monday, from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Life, which had already shrunken over the past three months because of the coronavirus lockdown, now seemed to become reduced to nothing.
During the day I wrote a bit, then at noon we went to rallies, and at 7:30 it was already time to go home. But it was hard not to feel that this was a clash of two events: The historic pandemic met another historic event, which people have experienced first-hand for many generations. The scare from coronavirus disappeared inside the rage, violence and institutional racism.
Violence, rage and despair were converging on my home, or so it felt. Curfew followed a pandemic, and this all had the feeling of society unraveling. The days became suffocating and condensed. We opened the windows, but no air came in, only the blasting sirens of police. Is this the New York that have dreamed of as a teen, the New York of Woody Allen, Spike Lee, John Coltrane, and Bob Dylan?
A famous American author said something along the lines, "New York is not a city, it is an idea of what a city can be."
This is also how I used to see the city. It used to be the ideal city for me, the city of my imaginations that sits on real buildings and streets, a city built for me.
But the rage on the streets took off the veil from my imaginary city and showed its true colors, an actual city: a broken city whose rotten underpinning lay bare. New York has become a ghost city with shuttered stores, with battle zones, with swarms of people calling us to see reality as it is.
