Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  Not that any of us boys, including Jeffrey Wacker, found it easy to be at peace, anywhere. Rahm, Ari, and I struggled to be quiet and Jeffrey was just as fidgety and distracted. His parents, who were brilliant but generally unable to cope with everyday life, had not taught Jeffrey much about how to fit into social situations or to moderate his behavior out of consideration for others. Individually they both struggled with psychiatric diagnoses that were much more serious than garden-variety neurosis. Mrs. Wacker had had multiple admissions to psychiatry wards. Mr. Wacker, who was a whiz in math but socially inept, worked only sporadically and vacillated between joy and despair. Together, they made a marriage that always seemed to teeter on the edge of disaster.

  Raised in an insecure and unstable home, Jeffrey suffered and his parents knew it. Finally, on a day when Mrs. Wacker was once again admitted to the hospital, her husband showed up at our apartment with his son and asked if the boy could stay. My father the pediatrician and my mother—the woman who always tried to do the right thing—said yes. An extra place was set at the table and a bed was purchased and placed at the foot of mine. Jeffrey was enrolled at Brennemann Elementary, our neighborhood public school. My mother found a psychotherapist who would treat him, and we all tried to help him get accustomed to the routine of life with the Emanuels.

  Life was not easy for Jeffrey. In a hyperverbal household where quick retorts and arguments were the main currency of conversation, he rarely found a way to fit in. Although he was incredibly intelligent, he was socially tone-deaf and struggled to follow a fast-paced conversation. Most of the time he was two beats behind the flow, responding to points that had already been made and settled, with statements that were non sequiturs. These statements would either stop the conversation cold for a few uncomfortable moments, or be greeted with a response from Rahm along the lines of “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about, Jeffrey.”

  What made it worse was that Jeffrey had no sense of his own deficiencies. He assumed he knew things he did not know, or had talents and skills he never possessed, and just dove into every situation.

  The best example of Jeffrey’s unnerving, almost fantastic way of thinking arose when we all went to a swimming pool. Having been taught to swim when we were toddlers, Ari, Rahm, and I dove in and glided to the surface like a trio of dolphins. Jeffrey followed, hurling himself into the deep end and sinking like a stone. Having learned to expect anything from this boy, I watched him carefully and noticed he was in trouble. I raced to him and managed to push him to the surface and over to the side of the pool. Once he got hold of the wall of the pool and caught his breath he gasped, “Wow, that was fun. Let’s do it again!”

  We did not “do it again.” In fact, Jeffrey was consigned to the shallow end of the pool for the rest of the day. In the weeks and months that followed, we all paid close attention to him, for safety’s sake, even though he was often irritating. “A tough kid to love,” was how my mother put it.

  Our initial adventure with Jeffrey lasted for about a year. In that time we tried to treat him like the fourth brother. He joined us when we attacked my dad on the dining room floor and he was welcomed onto my parent’s bed for story time. He was even covered under our all-for-one/one-for-all rule for back alley fighting, which meant that when he was attacked, we all came to his aid. Soon enough Jeffrey came to abuse this power by goading kids into a scrap and then depending on Ari, who was becoming a rather dominant fighter, to step in, which he always did.

  Because loyalty and sticking up for the underdog were hallmark Emanuel values, we never let Jeffrey down no matter how annoyed we got about the crowding in the bedroom, the fights he instigated, and his strange way of talking. Then one day his parents returned, collected his belongings, and took him away. It was not the last we would see of Jeffrey and his parents. For the next ten years, they stayed in touch and every so often his mother or father would show up at the door asking if we could take him in again.

  My mother knew that things sometimes got rough and even dangerous at the Wacker home so she always said yes, and Jeffrey would rejoin our household for a few days, weeks, or months. Once she even tried to delay Mrs. Wacker when she came to retrieve her son because she could see that Mrs. Wacker was not psychologically stable and ready to resume her duties as a mother. We helped see Jeffrey through his parents’ separation and divorce. My dad became Jeffrey’s only true father figure when Mr. Wacker went to live in an old mining town somewhere out west.

  Eventually Jeffrey would graduate from high school, leave Chicago, marry, and settle in California. We could hope that in his time with us he learned something about family and the positive possibilities of socialization. We learned we were fortunate to have been born to parents who could give us so much, and that the suffering of others (something my parents often discussed) wasn’t something abstract and distant. Unable to care for himself, Jeffrey had truly paid a price for something completely beyond his control and he had only been helped when someone cared enough to act. The fact that the “someone” was my mother reinforced for us the idea that you should not stand with your hands in your pockets waiting for others to make the sacrifice that matters. If you can do the right thing to make a person’s life better, you do it.

  Jeffrey wasn’t the last extra Emanuel brother and, technically speaking, he wasn’t the first, either. Years before Jeffrey moved in with the three of us, my father brought home a baby boy named Boaz and announced to my mother that she was going to take care of him, along with me and Rahm, who was only a few months old. The baby belonged to another resident doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital and his wife, who was a nurse. All my father would say about them is that they were good people, and fellow Israelis, who were having problems and needed help.

  Boaz got the same care, feeding, and cuddling as Rahm and me and he was part of everything we did, from visits to the park to shopping trips. On some weekends his mother came and took him away for a few days. On others, his father appeared for extended visits. After a few months passed, Boaz went back with his parents.

  Along with Jeffrey Wacker, Boaz set a pattern that would be repeated, many times. My parents would offer their help to a friend or relative and suddenly our nuclear family would include a new member. The arrangements were made out of our view. All we knew was that suddenly a new boy or young man would appear at the dinner table. Some, like our cousin Gary, came for a few months, returned to their parents, and then came back for a second or even third stay with us. Another cousin, Teddy, was well into his teen years when he came to stay with us. An alienated and lonely adolescent, Teddy had exhausted his parents’ patience. At our house, he found a refuge where there was always something to do, and my mother was always willing to talk and, more important, listen.

  My mother seemed a sort of expert nurturer, a woman who could make any child feel safe, secure, and valued. She was a highly intelligent, energetic, and motivated woman who was denied other careers, and motherhood was her profession. At the time it was a logical and productive way to channel her energies. I suspect that millions of other mothers in these pre-women’s-liberation days did the same.

  Besides receiving my mother’s attention, the older boys like Teddy and, later, Ralph Feldstein and Jack Skayan, got to be big brothers to the three of us. This role got them out of focusing on their own problems and into the pleasure of helping someone else. Ralph taught us how to swing a hammer and wield an electric saw when my parents allowed him to build a fairly elaborate wall unit in our family room. The end product was not exactly professional quality, but it was a cheap and sturdy piece of furniture that, more than forty years later, still supports a television and piles of books in my parents’ basement.

  Still, of all the visitors to our home, it was our grandfather Herman who had the most influence on our lives. He stopped by often and lived with us for almost two years in the early 1970s. During this time, he would commandeer the kitchen on Saturday mornings and set to work making toast, slicing bagels, scr
ambling eggs, and frying steaks. He did all this while dressed in his white boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and pausing, every now and then, to slurp orange juice from a big open carton and burp loudly.

  Although the smells coming from the kitchen alerted us to the banquet that awaited, he wouldn’t call us until everything was just about ready. We took our seats as he put plates on the table. In the process he might playfully smack the back of Rahm’s head or call Ari “a good-for-nothin’ momser,” which is Yiddish for “bastard.” But as rough as he was, we knew he was trying to connect with us. As Rahm would later say, “I don’t think he knew anything else to say” to a bunch of verbally endowed but scrawny young kids.

  When breakfast was over we went off to rest our swollen bellies or followed the Big Bangah out to his station wagon for a ride. For as long as I knew him the Big Bangah sold imported Scandinavian foods—cheeses, bacon, ham, butter cookies, candies, and other products—which he often delivered to stores and restaurants himself. On many Saturdays he made the rounds of his customers to deliver items that were piled in the back of the station wagon. On these days we would crisscross Chicago, or dash up to small towns in Wisconsin, at breakneck speed, weaving in and out of traffic and treating stop signs and red lights as if they were recommendations.

  Although my mother was vigilant about seat belts, her father was not and we bounced around in the back of his huge Ford station wagon like boy-sized salamis. Wherever we stopped we followed him inside, lugging boxes and tins loaded with delicacies. Once we set the goods down, we got to watch him schmooze with his customers like they were close friends.

  It did not matter whether we were in Polishtown, the South Side, or in some town in Wisconsin; Herman always acted like he belonged. His customers welcomed him with loud greetings and implored him to gossip about their competitors or commiserate about the state of business, which was never quite good enough. He was, for these shopkeepers, like the traveling storytellers of old who kept people apprised of the news from abroad.

  In exchange for his information and stories, Herman took the kind of liberties reserved for family, grabbing Cokes or cookies for us without ever asking. I’ll never forget how he reached right into the oven at one bagel shop on Kedzie Avenue and pulled out a handful of hot mini-bagels and gave them to us. I don’t know which was more impressive, the exquisite taste of a bagel so perfectly fresh and hot, or my grandfather’s pain-defying reach into the oven. For me, a skinny kid, the sight of those huge callused mitts plunging into the oven was the very picture of toughness. The only way we could hold on to our treats was to juggle them from hand to hand while they cooled.

  Often gruff and intimidating with adults at home, Herman was usually energetic, confident, and generous with us boys. He gave Gary and me tickets for the one and only pro football game I ever saw, at a frigid Wrigley Field. (The Bears moved to Soldier Field in 1971.) During a trip to some general store in the hinterlands, he sprang for my first wristwatch. I was six or seven years old but he did not buy me a kid’s model with Mickey Mouse or some other playful image on the face. Instead he got me a serious grown-up timepiece with a big white dial and black hands that pointed to numerals stamped on the face in blocky black type. My wrist was so skinny that he had to get a woman’s model and he asked the store owner to punch two extra holes in the leather strap so it would stay on. However, it was a real watch and Herman knew that when I wore it I felt one step closer to adulthood.

  In most cases, days spent driving around with my grandfather were about adventure and involved a lot of raucous interactions. His big, meaty hands made the steering wheel look small and delicate and his booming voice—“Shut up back there already!”—practically shook the windows of the car. On one occasion, when Ari and Rahm went out with him, the Big Bangah actually followed through on a threat we had always considered idle. For years he’d warned, “I’ll put you out of this car and leave you here!” but we never believed him. On this trip he got so fed up with Ari and Rahm that he actually pulled over on some isolated roadside in rural Wisconsin and ordered them out. They were about seven and nine years old and could not believe that Herman would actually drive away, but he did.

  Ornery as they could be, Rahm and Ari were also little boys and as they watched the station wagon disappear they became worried, anxious, and then truly upset. Rural Wisconsin may as well have been Zamboanga to them and they soon began to panic. They thought about finding a pay phone to call for help but realized that they did not know which way to walk in order to find civilization and that even if they did find a phone they did not have any money to pay for a call. In their telling of the story they were stuck there for an hour before Herman came back, muttered something about hoping they had learned a lesson, and let them into the car. For all I know they had only been alone for a few minutes or so.

  Fortunately, Herman rarely acted on his threats. Instead he took pains to instruct us on how to be his kind of man. At mealtimes he might take us into a diner, or roadside café, and generously urge us to order what we wanted, including foods that were never in the refrigerator at home, like cherry Cokes and orange pop. Watching him move so confidently as he interacted with shopkeepers, countermen, cooks, and bakers was like watching a veteran pol work a precinct meeting. He flashed a huge smile, talked sports and current events, slapped backs, and busted chops. Despite our current reputation, my brothers and I were cautious and even a little shy back then whenever we entered unfamiliar settings or encountered new people. We would each develop strategies to overcome this social anxiety to a certain extent, but Ari and I will never be as comfortable as Rahm, who was destined to become a professional politician and nearly Herman’s equal when it came to small talk and jokes.

  Between stops, the Big Bangah told us stories about how he had managed to make it in a world that wasn’t always friendly to a Russian Jewish immigrant with hardly any formal education. The world he described, where powerful people and institutions rejected him because of his religion and nationality, led him to develop his tough, masculine personality. It was not the world we knew, but hearing about it helped us understand and appreciate him even if we could not emulate him.

  A different, but equally impressive view of Herman’s life came into focus when we attended services at the storefront synagogue he had helped to build. Located in the old Jewish neighborhood of Albany Park, the shul was home to about a hundred congregants, all middle-aged and older, including my family. We were the only children who ever attended the services. My brothers and I resisted and complained about getting dressed up and schlepping to the synagogue but once we got there we were proud to see how much people respected our grandfather. All during services he would wander the aisles, and whisper to various congregants. And he would invariably be the one who supplied the food for the Yom Kippur break fast or Saturday kiddushes. Most important, when something needed to be done—someone driven home after services, food delivered to someone who had just come home from the hospital, or an electric light fixed—Big Bangah just did it without the need to be asked or thanked. We basked in the reflected glory and, since we were the only children who attended services there, we came in for lots of cheek-pinching attention.

  Services at the temple were conducted entirely in Hebrew, but if someone made impromptu remarks, they were made in Yiddish. Attendance varied depending on the time of year, but high holy day services were always quite crowded. They frequently got too loud for anyone to hear the actual prayer service. And then Herman would raise his enormous mitt of a right hand and bang it down on the counter, instantly bringing order to the old ladies gossiping and other loud murmurings.

  On Yom Kippur we also watched as the congregation raised the money to fund the shul for the coming year. Conducted during a pause in the service, this collection began with an announcement. A few thousand dollars were required to pay the utilities and repairs, and members were asked to say, out loud, how much they were willing to contribute. Offers of ten to twenty dollars were
voiced and usually the action stopped a few hundred dollars short of the goal. Everyone would look toward my father. He would smile and nod, which was the signal that Dr. Emanuel would fill the gap.

  After services people stayed to mingle over honey cake, tea, and kosher wine. Many but not all of the people who went to that temple kept kosher households, either out of religious conviction or because the practice was part of their Jewish identity. When it came to theology the people at the Albany temple, like Jews in general, were all over the map.

  In my family, we expressed our Judaism through our commitment to Israel, attending Jewish day school, and a devotion to the Friday night dinners. In keeping with tradition my mother lit candles and did the blessing, my father did the wine blessing, and one of us kids blessed the challah. My parents were not so religious that we did the handwashing, blessing of the children, or grace after meals that my children and I now include. Attendance at these dinners was mandatory and only a medical emergency would keep my father away. The meal was never fancy, but the table was set with a white tablecloth and cloth napkins, and the menu invariably included a roast chicken, vegetables, and salad.

  If ever peace reigned in our home it was on these Friday nights when the TV and radio were switched off and no one answered the telephone. We still indulged in lively conversation and debate, but we made more of an effort to show respect for one another as we affirmed our Jewish identity.

  In our family, the God of the burning bush was a concept that served a purpose when it was devised in ancient times but was not a matter of literal truth. Sure, there were references to God in our everyday conversations, especially from my mother, but in truth she was agnostic, and my father, if pressed, would say he’s an atheist. But this would not be a deeply considered answer. It would be a way to brush off the question, which he wouldn’t consider seriously. My father was never the type to be seriously bothered by a metaphysical question. He had neither a scientist’s nor a theologian’s interest in the origins of the universe or the nature of morality. Instead he was interested in watching and interacting with people, and thrilled at both the variety and the creativity in human expression.