REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Call in Israel Market: ‘May Saddam’s Name Be Erased!’ : Mideast: Vendors hawk their produce as shoppers carry gas mask kits with their grocery bags.

Shuk Hacarmel, Tel Aviv’s central farmers’ market, reopened Sunday after a three-day missile break, and shoppers laden with their gas mask kits and grocery bags were treated to a wartime chorus among the raucous chants of vendors hawking their fruits and vegetables.

“Eggplant--one shekel a kilo,” one man cried, then added, even louder: “May Saddam’s name be erased! One shekel a kilo. May Saddam’s name be erased!”

The curse is one of the most severe in Jewish tradition, normally reserved for the likes of Adolf Hitler.

Nearby, a tomato seller, instead of starting a price war, entered into competition over who could shout the worst fate for the Iraqi president.

“Tomatoes--one-half shekel a kilo!” she called. “May Saddam be liquidated and vaporized! Tomatoes--one-half shekel a kilo!”

A. B. Yehoshua, one of the country’s best-known authors, came up with a comic interpretation of the Israeli refusal to play into Saddam Hussein’s hands by retaliating now for the Iraqi missile strikes.

He is reminded, Yehoshua told the daily Maariv newspaper, of the old joke about the sadists and the masochists:

“Hit me, hit me,” the masochist says.

“No,” says the sadist.

“Saddam Hussein, the masochist, is asking to be hit,” Yehoshua said. “But we won’t give him that satisfaction.”

Among all the stories of the unlikely sideshows to a major emergency, Tel Aviv resident Lori Mendel, formerly of Los Angeles, had one of the most touching.

Almost immediately after the civil defense alarm sounded to warn of the Iraqi missile attack Friday night, she said, there was a knock on the door.

“I went to open it,” she said, “and this guy is standing there with his shirt over his face, saying, ‘I’m scared! I’m scared!’ ”

“He came in--my bedroom is close to the door--and looked like he was heading straight for under the covers.”

Mendel ended up giving shelter to the man, who appeared to have been living on the streets and kept crying, “Mommy, mommy,” for almost three hours, until a friend of Mendel’s finally talked him into leaving.

His panicky demands for her gas mask annoyed her, Mendel said, but afterward she realized that “it was a lot better to be angry at him than to sit here and worry about myself.”

And as he left, she said, “The guy said to my friend, ‘Tell her thank you.’ ”

Amid the twisted wreckage left by an Iraqi missile at a Tel Aviv community center, there suddenly appeared a dapper man in a blue polo shirt, gray flannel trousers and Italian loafers.

What was Zubin Mehta, the former conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, doing among the harried police and soldiers and tearful survivors?

For one thing, he was praising Shlomo Lahat, the white-haired mayor of Tel Aviv.

“This area is like Watts,” Mehta said. “This great mayor has built this center for the people.”

Lahat will have to build it again, after the missile blew out some of its walls and windows.

The mayor, nicknamed “Cheech,” has been working hard to reassure residents that there is no need to panic, but Tel Aviv pundits are already saying the city needs a new slogan: Instead of calling itself a city without a hafsakah-- which means a stop or a break in Hebrew--they say it should bill itself as the city without a hafgazah --a bombing attack.

The alarms that have sounded several times so far warning of possible missile attacks are creating problems for some hoteliers.

According to the manager of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, certain patrons of the hotel’s restaurants have been taking unfair advantage of the alarms.

When the siren goes off, everyone rushes to an area that has been specially sealed and dons a gas mask--the problem is that afterward, when the all-clear has sounded, some of them never return to their tables to pay their checks.