Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  In all their conversations about the house, my father listened to everything my mother had to say and, as was his style, hardly ever raised his voice or showed much feeling. He was, however, unmovable. To him a house in the suburbs was part of the good life, and an essential element of his plan to make our family financially secure. As the sole earner, my father could wield this last point, about financial security, as a kind of trump card. To be fair, he hardly ever threw it down. But when he did, my mother had no good defense against it. Not that she did not try. “What about schools?” she asked. “The boys are doing beautifully at Anshe Emet.”

  Here my father had done his homework. The small Wilmette district had excellent elementary and junior high schools and fed students to New Trier High, which was one of the best public high schools, if not the best, in the country. Local taxpayers routinely approved increased spending for the school system, which had just opened a $75 million (2011 dollars) high school—New Trier West—that adopted the same high standards for teachers and students as the original New Trier, where many courses were offered at a college level.

  The public schools might be good, my mother allowed, but what about the social environment? For generations, Jews had been excluded from the North Shore suburbs. Some neighborhoods and private clubs still kept Jews out. How might that affect us?

  My father had to admit that anti-Semitism had once been a big problem, and the older, eastern parts of Wilmette were still populated almost exclusively by white, non-Jewish families. However, new subdivisions on the west side of town had become magnets for upwardly mobile Jewish families. Doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople, many of whom grew up on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, in North Lawndale, or Albany Park, made Wilmette the place where they declared themselves upper-middle-class homeowners. In the end there was nothing my mother could say or do to stop our relocation. She ceased arguing and reluctantly began to prepare for a new life.

  As my mother contemplated all she would lose in the move, she got one little bit of good news. Savta decided to return to Israel rather than settle with us in the suburbs. But otherwise my mother faced a grim prospect, forced to prepare for a life she did not want, in a place she did not like.

  This was the fate of millions of women in the 1960s. With limited options for work they threw themselves into the roles of wife, mother, homemaker, and community volunteer. These activities were worthwhile. But their lives revolved entirely around serving others. Most did not enjoy the power to make big decisions and, by definition, their jobs came with built-in obsolescence. Inevitably kids grow up. They need you less and less, until the day they leave home. Your purpose in life quite literally walks out the door. Then, there you are, with little to no experience in the working world and few marketable skills.

  The first thing my mother did as she faced the prospect of suburban life was to take driving lessons, acquire a learner’s permit, and practice by motoring in our white Pontiac Bonneville from Winona Street to Wilmette. On more than one of these trips my mother might get temporarily lost and we’d watch as her mood, which was not good to begin with, worsened. Once, when she decided to practice parking at the Turnstyle shopping center, near our new house, I got out and tried to direct her into a space that was big enough for two cars. Somehow she managed to wedge the Bonneville in at such an extreme angle that she could not get out. We had to wait until someone arrived to move the car in the spot next to ours. Only then was she able to back out, and beat a hasty retreat to the city. On other occasions she tried to be calm when faced with impatient drivers who honked their horns or raced around us. In a bid to josh her out of her funk, Ari and Rahm scrambled into the backseat and held up signs they had made that said, BEWARE, NEW DRIVER and NEW DRIVER, STAY AWAY. She was enough of a good sport to laugh along.

  Our mother shouldered almost all of the responsibility for the family’s big move from city to suburb. Our job was to stay out of the way, which we were never very good at. We were curious, after all, and wanted to be “helpful.” As moving day got closer, we could feel our mother getting more and more tense. Whenever we noticed her sliding into this kind of mood, we tried to think of something we could do that might please her. The solution was for us to “surprise” her by helping out. Since we were under strict orders to leave things alone, we picked an out-of-the-way spot—the walk-through closet connecting our study and the bathroom—and tried to save her the chore of packing some of our stuff.

  The walls of the closet held built-in chests of drawers topped with a clothes rod and then shelves. The shelves were piled with puzzles and board games like Parcheesi, Monopoly, checkers, and chess. Of course, the cardboard boxes that held them were squashed and broken, which meant that all of the pieces inside were only loosely contained. Ignoring my mother’s orders, I climbed onto one of the chests and began pulling down games with one hand, which I then passed down to Rahm, who was supposed to collect them in neat stacks in the hallway outside the door.

  As I handed each game down from the shelves I asked, “Are you being careful to stack them neatly?” He said “Yes, yes” as he stretched to take the games out of my hands and simply piled them on the floor, letting some of their contents spill out.

  I kept asking him if he was being neat.

  Exasperated, he shouted back, “Shut up! I’m trying!”

  Before I could shush him so that my mother wouldn’t catch us, Rahm lost control of a box holding a game with umpteen pieces inside it. They tumbled out, making a sound like a plastic waterfall.

  In Rahm’s defense it must be said that no one could have made an orderly stack out of those battered and out-of-square game boxes. And as a hyperactive eight-and-a-half-year-old he was never the kind of kid who did anything in a neat and systematic way. (His youthful messiness is in complete contrast to the fact that today he never leaves a piece of paper on his desk at the end of the day.) Of course, these details did not matter to my mother, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Already sweaty and dirty from packing, she looked at the mess on the floor and at me balancing on the chest in the closet and her face flushed red with all the anger and frustration that had been building inside her ever since my father announced he had bought the house in Wilmette.

  “Get down, Jonny!”

  “But we’re helping,” I said.

  “I told you not to.”

  I should have noticed that her voice sounded more serious than usual but when it came to this kind of nuance—judging mood, temper, impatience—I was pretty tone-deaf. While Rahm recognized that something bad was about to happen and backed away, I did what I always did. I argued and defended my position.

  In almost any other circumstance my mother might have indulged a little debate and sass from me. In this moment she completely lost control. Although the words she uttered were soon forgotten, her anger became a permanent memory as she reached for the nearest available weapon, a long stick that one of us boys, or perhaps our dog, had dragged home from the park. She swung to whack me on the rear end but I moved. The stick caught my back and broke in two, which made more of an impression on me than the burning red welt caused by the blow. I scampered away, suddenly cognizant of the fact that it was possible to go too far, and that even my pacifist mother might be moved to violence under duress.

  She ordered us to go to our room while she straightened up the mess we had made. We stayed in the room in scared silence, shocked by what had happened. My mother was shocked, too, and nothing was ever said about it.

  When moving day finally arrived, our cousin Teddy was engaged to occupy us away from the apartment. Teddy was one of the few people up to the task. He took us by bus down to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where he thought we should be able to kill several hours. We were so filled with excitement about the move that we did not have the patience for observing elephants, monkeys, and bears. We raced through the place and then looked at him as if to say, “Now what?”

  Regarding us as the wild animals that we were, Teddy decided to wear us out by h
aving us walk all the way home. Five miles separated the zoo from 931 Winona Street. Teddy made the time pass by telling us lots of jokes and stories, inventing complicated steps for us to copy as we leaped over cracks in the sidewalk, and letting us stop for ice cream. By the time we reached Winona Street the moving truck was fully loaded and my parents were about ready for us to pile into the car. Despite our somewhat prickly exteriors, Emanuels are sentimentalists who cherish relationships and cry easily. Hoping to avoid sloppy goodbyes, we did not seek out friends and neighbors for farewells. We told ourselves that Wilmette was only a half hour away by car and so of course we would be seeing them all again soon. As Rahm, Ari, and I crowded into the backseat of the car and wiggled and pushed one another for space, we could not begin to imagine the life that awaited us.

  The deal my parents made allowed my father to move us to Wilmette in the spring of 1968, only if we would continue to attend classes at Anshe Emet until the end of the school year. This arrangement required that he drop us off every morning at North Pine Grove Street. We got home with the aid of two teachers, Mrs. Dubavick and Ms. Goldstein, who lived in Skokie, not far from our home in Wilmette, and drove us every afternoon.

  For kids accustomed to living in the city, Wilmette seemed more like a vast and underpopulated prairie than a human community. The town still claimed one operating farm, and everything was so spread out that instead of blocks, distances were measured in miles. The town had no buses, and while a commuter train and the Chicago L ended at Linden Street in Wilmette, the stations were on the east side of the town, miles from our home. Given the lack of public transportation, a kid who wanted to go anywhere would either catch a car ride courtesy of some adult or pedal his bike for at least a half hour.

  Fortunately our block was home to lots of families with kids. If you stood in our front yard you could throw a rock to four houses that were home to boys who would be in my grade at Romona Elementary, which would become my school in the fall. They all played Little League baseball, which was a very big deal in Wilmette. Raised by a father who did not know the difference between a ground ball and a curveball, Rahm, Ari, and I would never don uniforms and play. However, we would ride our bikes over to watch the games, serve as batboys, and work in the concession stand. But where this one bastion of middle-class America was concerned, we would always be outsiders.

  We did, however, find other ways to connect with the kids in our neighborhood. Here my mother’s laid-back style came in very handy. The boys who lived on our block loved hanging out in a place where nobody got uptight about noise, or mess, or how much food you ate. My mother also made kids feel comfortable by letting them speak their minds and listening when they opened up. She was happy to be a sounding board for kids with problems that might not be taken seriously by other adults. Eventually she too would make connections and find outlets for her passions in the strange new land of suburbia. But it would take time. First we had to make a long summer trip to Israel, where we would renew our relationships with friends, family, and a country we had come to know under unexpected circumstances the previous year.

  Nine

  ISRAEL

  Before sunrise on June 5, 1967, I heard whispering and wandered out of our room to find my parents on their knees in the darkened family room, their faces aglow from the flickering light of our black-and-white TV. The sound was turned down low, and they were both listening and watching intently. Israel was at war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

  The fighting was not unexpected. Neighboring countries, officially committed to its destruction, had harassed and threatened Israel ever since its creation. In the weeks before the war, Egypt cut off Israel’s access to the Red Sea and completed a military alliance with Jordan and Syria. All three countries began positioning arms and men on their borders with Israel, and Arab sentiment shifted decidedly in favor of armed conflict. The rest of the world feared the United States entering the conflict on Israel’s side and the Soviet Union joining the Arabs. After negotiations failed, Israel’s leaders had decided that the best defense would be offense. This was a tactic my father favored in life as well as war.

  The scale of the attack far exceeded anything that outside military experts expected from the Israeli Defense Forces, and in the early hours of the war reporters struggled to provide information. No one watching television or listening to the radio could be certain about what was happening. Still my parents craved information and remained in front of the television. They knew scores of people who lived in Israel and all were within range of enemy warplanes and artillery. They also understood that the IDF was vastly outnumbered as the enemy fielded twice as many troops and three times as many aircraft and tanks.

  I stayed with my parents while the sun rose. Ari and Rahm got up and we went to Anshe Emet, where the atmosphere was filled with apprehension. By the middle of the day the news reports said that Israel had overwhelmed its enemies with the almost flawless execution of a brilliant strategy. On June 10, as the fighting ended, Israel held the Sinai Peninsula, the entire city of Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the strategically vital Golan Heights, where Syria had located guns that had shelled the Galilee region of Israel, including a kibbutz where one of our cousins worked.

  As stories of heroism and victory poured in from the battlefield, military experts around the world marveled at the IDF’s proficiency. Israeli planes had all but destroyed the much larger Egyptian air force. Counterattacks made by Jordan, Iraq, and Syria were repulsed. It seemed as if in an instant, Israel had become mature, muscular, and feared, and this recognition by the world community made Jews around the world feel exceedingly proud. As international Jewish organizations and Israeli agencies appealed for support, millions of people sent donations. My mother and father decided to send us.

  Considering the fact that gunshots could still be heard in border towns and terrorists still living within Israel could attack anywhere in the country, it may have seemed a strange—even irresponsible—moment for my mother to haul her three sons from Chicago to Tel Aviv. But the decision to send us there, in this time of emergency and danger, was not made lightly. My parents read everything they could find on conditions on the ground in Israel and my father called friends, who reported that life was quickly returning to normal. After concluding that common sense and a little extra vigilance would keep us safe, my parents considered the import of the moment in history and decided that it was the perfect time for us to learn more about our heritage, not to mention the country that we, as Jews, could claim as our own.

  Once the question of safety was resolved, the big challenge of this trip would be maintaining our sanity during the six-thousand-mile journey. My mother brought snacks for us, plus an armload of little games, books, Highlights magazines, and word puzzle books. The books, puzzles, and magazines helped Rahm and me pass the time but were of little interest to a dyslexic kid like Ari. Unable to stay in his seat, Ari, who was just six years old, roamed the Boeing 707 aircraft and became the darling of the economy-class cabin, accepting treats and engaging in long conversations with the other passengers. He prodded us to play with him and tried to burn off energy by marching up and down the aisle. My mother spent so much time exploring the plane with Ari to make sure he did not annoy people too much, she said, “I walked all the way from Chicago to Israel.”

  Between 1967 and 1970 we would make four of these long summer trips to Israel. Each one lasted the entire summer and was financed in part by my father’s shrewd investment in the stock of a company called McDonald’s. These were not so much vacations as a chance to live, for a season, as Israelis. We ate the local cuisine, played on the beaches, swam in the sea, shopped in the markets, and practiced our Hebrew.

  On our first trip Ari, Rahm, and I fought with one another to see who would be the first to scuttle down the stairs that were brought up to the tail of the plane and stand on Israeli soil. I won, and after I put my feet down on the ground I also bent down to touch the oily tarmac with my hand
s. All around me people were doing the same thing, making direct contact with the land that represented acceptance, dignity, and, should he or she need it, a safe haven for every Jew in the world. Even at age nine I understood the seriousness of history and the pride and joy represented by a Jewish state. And it did not seem strange to me that some of my fellow passengers cried as they stood beside the plane.

  The military presence in Israel made a big impression on us. The recent war had heightened security concerns and led the authorities to put even more troops in the streets. As boys, we were in awe of the soldiers. Whenever we were in a car and saw them hitchhiking we urged whoever was driving to offer them a ride and then seized the chance to examine their rifles and pepper them with questions.

  Except for the many soldiers we saw, Israel circa 1967 struck us as a place where the climate and the pace of life were relaxed and comfortable—more Mediterranean than American. The place was much poorer, in material terms, than America. There was no television and very few people had phones in their homes. And compared to the United States, where we were accustomed to seeing roads and highways jammed with private cars, most Israelis rode buses, walked, or pedaled bikes.