Journal of a Naked Poet - VII

Well, to make a long story shorter, I dropped out of Cal in December, 1964. I immediately felt much freer, and the pressure was gone. My friend Mike, whom I had known since our "ham" radio days in high school, was tired of living in squalor in SF, and convinced me to go back to San Diego. We got jobs down there, and shared an apartment right across the street from the old, downtown campus of San Diego City College, where I had spent two years. It was there that I first met a young, bearded Lubavitcher Hasid (or Chassid, if you prefer) named John Blank (not the John Blank of Portland, OR, whom I still know). Anyway, he introduced me to the music of Shlomo Carlebach, whom I would eventually meet. That was one of those seminal experiences that I mentioned earlier. I had never met, and still have not met, a person as charismatic as Rabbi Carlebach. That was also the year when I first met Julie Savary, and we would be friends for the rest of her life (she was, unfortunately, killed in an automobile accident in Mexico in 2002). Julie's birthday was January 29. My earlier girlfriend, Cheryl, had her birthday on March 29. The birthday of my wife, Sandy, to whom I have been married for forty years, was born on July 29. Strange. Three of the most important women in my life, all with birthdays on the 29th.

While I'm on the subject of women, I must also mention Ilse "Elsa" Operschall, whom I also met in that year, after I returned to SF. We did not have an intimate relationship, but we definitely had a spiritual one.

Elsa (who later preferred to be called by her middle name, Johanna) was from Vienna, and was, like me, multilingual. Those languages, in her case German, English, and French, had landed her a job at the New York World's Fair a few years earlier. She came back in 1965 to teach German at Berlitz in San Francisco, where I was a receptionist and English teacher, We had had a few conversations, and I knew that she was half-Jewish and interested in learning about that side of her heritage (an interest that I shared, although I didn't yet know that I, too, had some of that heritage). One of my duties was to prepare the classrooms for the teachers, and one day I left a big "Shalom!" in Hebrew handwriting on her blackboard. I didn't even know if she would be able to read it. After the class, she came out to my desk in the front office, and said "Did I find a Shalom on my blackboard?" I admitted that I had left it there, and we became fast friends.

When I first arrived in SF (1963), you could ride the Muni buses and trollies for 15 cents. You could also buy a hot dog on Market Street for 18 cents, or a hamburger for 25 cents. Cheryl had introduced me to one of those hole-in-the-wall burger places, run by an older, Jewish guy named Art, whom I became friendly with, often stopping there. One day I heard Art use a Hebrew phrase, which I understood, with his assistant. As a little test, I asked him how to say "moon" in Hebrew. He said "that would be 'levanah,'" which was the correct answer. Anyway, "Elsa" and I started taking Hebrew lessons together from Art. We did a great many other things together. I remember, in particular, having lunch with her at Zim's. We ordered hamburgers, but they gave us cheeseburgers, which she sent back to the kitchen, saying "it's against our religion." I took her with me to a Shlomo Carlebach concert at the Berkeley Community Theater, where we both received " The Rebbe's Kiss," and afterward sang and danced through the streets of Berkeley, following Rabbi Carlebach on the way to the shul. I recently learned that Elsa, by then calling herself "Johanna," had become a doctor. She passed away a few years ago, from cancer. I feel her presence sometimes, as I feel that of Julie. They are out there, somewhere.

Text © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.