A modern-day Marcel Proust with a Texas twang, platinum hair and American flags flapping in the evening breeze, Helen Gelber Lewison is driving down Ninth Avenue in San Francisco, offering her opinions on everything from Buddhists to yuppies. Although the 78-year-old Lewison favors a stream-of-consciousness discourse, with no topic off limits or fully explored, she nonetheless ends each sentence with an imaginary exclamation point to drive the point home.
“I call the corner of Ninth and Irving the home of the Lower Yuppies!” said Lewison, who has lived in the area for nearly four decades. “They can’t afford to live in the Marina, so they slum it here instead!
“I think it’s important to defend Israel, but I really don’t understand all this crazy desire for war! I’m a World War II gal, and I’ve lived through wars in my life, thank you very much!”
“Let me tell you something else. When you get to be my age, you need a gimmick — something that can hold people’s attention. Well, within the past five years, I’ve written three books, bought a brand-new computer, and developed my own Web site!” Pictures, some of her writings and information on ordering her books — which are available at www.amazon.com and other dealers — are posted at www.wacokid.com
At home, Lewison cackles and looks out her window, which offers a sweeping vista of San Francisco. To the left, the twinkling lights of Oakland glitter in the distance. There’s Sutro Towers to the right, the poetic silhouette of University of San Francisco next to that, and beyond is San Francisco’s downtown neon haze.
Lewison has stories about all these places. About living on the fringes of the beatnik community in the late ’50s. About being (briefly) a “working girl” for big firms when the city’s skyline was expanding rapidly. About growing up as a Jewish honky-tonk lovin’ rebel in Waco, Texas, and falling in and out of love several times a week.
She has put her stories onto paper during writing classes for seniors at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and she frequently pens “In first person” pieces for the Jewish Bulletin.
She has documented her life in several self-published books that recall both Proust and poet Charles Bukowski. No vignette is too mundane to be left untold, and the sparse language hints at greater truths beneath the surface. Her books contain mini-chapters — often just half a page — with titles such as “My Feral Years” (detailing all of her ardent admirers), “The Dump” (where Lewison discusses moving to the “wrong side of the track”), “Hillybilly Band” and “Commonsensical.”
In her book “Waco Kid,” Lewison talks about the kindness of her local rabbi, who instilled in her a brief love of Hebrew. He tried to steer her into a more “traditional” lifestyle, but as an adolescent, Lewison was too intent on kicking up her heels in the town’s local dive bars. Waco was also where her immigrant father gathered the family around the radio to listen to the rising storm in Nazi Germany, and where Lewison vividly recalls the Jim Crow laws, wondering aloud “how colored water tastes.”
In the recently published “I Forgot to Get Old,” Lewison spins tales of whirlwind romances. One was with a Jewish veteran of World War II, whom she married after a weeklong romance. The marriage dissolved when he developed a “messianic complex,” according to Lewison.
There was also a short, torrid romance with a Beat artist. That ended after she met Mel Lewison, her husband of more than 30 years.
“We fell in love after two weeks, and we were married for 33 years! That’s how things worked in those days!”
The death of her husband in 1992 prompted Lewison to pen the memoir “Seduction of Silence,” which details the cycle of grief, anger and forgiveness that Lewison experienced.
“It’s all there!” she exclaims. “The good, the bad and the ugly!”
Looking out from her well-lit, hilltop home, which kept the cold night at bay, Lewison said she hoped she “would be remembered as someone who left a little bit of her light burning.”
Musing, she said, “I want people to think of me and say to themselves, ‘Once upon a time, she wrote some books…'”
Lewison’s vice trails off, and she thinks about her legacy for a moment.
“Not only that, but she got to be really old, too!”