Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  The drama and danger in the story Yoel told was much more real and tangible than anything recorded in a book or recalled by the marker at some ancient battlefield. The fact that the place where the attack occurred was unchanged from that era, and I could sit with one of the bomb plotters and drink tea, made a profound impact on me. Yoel and the King David were solid, palpable proof that big, historic events were carried out by real people I knew, called upon to act, who were willing to live with the consequences.

  Public opinion was, and may forever remain, divided on the point, but Yoel believed that time had shown that the attack on the King David had been justified. He was certain that the bombing was a legitimate attack on a military target and that it had hastened the birth of the state of Israel and saved countless Jewish lives. In Yoel’s mind the casualties were the fault of the British officers who failed to heed the warnings.

  The stories people told about these grave and powerful events were often spiced by the flavor of personal experiences and unexpected connections. Yoel could tell bawdy jokes and swear in many languages. One of his best tales recalled the time when he and Batya took me, still a baby, my parents, and Esty, all crammed into my parents’ tiny Fiat, for a tour of the Negev Desert. The year was 1958 and thousands of Bedouins lived as nomads in the Negev, herding sheep and camels unmolested across Israel’s borders with Jordan and Egypt. Yoel found his way to one of their camps, where everyone piled out of the car like the circus clowns and he began talking with the man in charge.

  Yoel, whose Arabic was excellent, was such a friendly and gregarious fellow that the group was quickly invited inside one of the tents for lunch. Everyone sat on pillows and platters of food were served. The man in charge cast a romantic eye upon Esty, who, with her zaftig figure, represented the Bedouin feminine ideal.

  In short order, Yoel, with my father’s assistance, began negotiating with the sheikh over how much he would pay to make Esty one of his wives. After a great deal of bluffing and waving of hands, Yoel managed to get the price to six camels and a few goats. With my father roaring with laughter, Yoel decided to press his luck and ask what he might get if he added my mother, the tall, skinny one, to the deal.

  “Two chickens,” came the answer.

  It was, in the long history of my mother’s relationship with her sister, the only time she was deemed less desirable. The problem, of course, was that the sheikh was more than a little bit serious about adding Esty to his harem. As the sun set on the desert, Yoel had to do some fast talking to facilitate a peaceful exit and escape to Tel Aviv.

  The Bedouins were direct reminders that Israel was home to ancient cultures as well as fast-paced modern development. We found it all fascinating and we almost never felt afraid or out of place. The main exception to this rule was our first visit to an Israeli sleepaway camp, in the summer of 1969.

  The whole idea of the camp was for us to experience a bit of Israeli life on our own, away from our mother, and to give her and Esty a much-needed break. We hated the idea when it was first broached and hated it even more when we found ourselves alone at the camp with counselors who had decided to treat the Emanuels like they did all the other campers, by assigning us to cabins based on school grade. We all began to cry when each of us realized we would have to go alone to bunk with Israeli children our own age. Distressed by our show of emotion, the adults in charge of the camp quickly rearranged the rooms, letting the three of us bunk together in a four-man room.

  Apparently that little episode of bawling and special treatment wasn’t enough to make us pariahs. As the only Americans at the camp, we were the objects of much curiosity and our room became the in place to be. What we did and said was of great interest to the Israeli kids, but that did not stop them from teasing us when the moment required it. One night they showed a movie in the open-air theater. When the movie ended and the lights came up, there was Ari, slumped in his chair, not moving, with his eyes open. The adults panicked, thinking something was wrong, maybe he had had a seizure or fainted. One of the men picked him up and, as the other camp counselors shouted, began running to the medical station. Rahm and I were perplexed by all the commotion. Because he burned so much energy, Ari regularly fell asleep suddenly and slept very deeply. And he frequently had his eyes open. We tried to explain that there was nothing wrong—this was normal. Eventually everyone calmed down and took the sleeping boy to his bed.

  All the attention we received made our adjustment easier and in a matter of days we were actually able to enjoy the horseback riding, target shooting, pottery, and bonfires on the beach. Like so many kids, I got my first kiss at camp—from a beautiful brunette girl named Ronit. We also got to test ourselves in the end-of-camp sports competitions.

  Ari was especially assertive, throwing himself into sports he had barely played before, such as soccer, and dominating simple contests like capture the flag. Watching him at camp, it was hard to deny that he was a fierce and fearless competitor. In part he was showing the effects of growing up with highly competitive brothers. But the sibling rivalry wasn’t his only advantage. Ari was also driven by an intense desire to prove, despite his obvious problems with reading and focusing his attention, that he was as good as, if not better than, anyone else.

  Combine Ari’s drive with a setting like Israel, where everyone seemed to be striving and competing with a sense of life-or-death urgency, and you got a kid who won a handful of first prizes and also became one of the more popular boys in the camp. Pitted against kids his own age, instead of his older brothers, Ari found a level of success beyond what he had experienced at home and at school. Whether the competition involved swimming, basketball, or running, he loved winning.

  Israelis admire a fellow who can get things done and none of them seemed to mind Ari’s sharp-elbowed intensity. Courage and physical toughness were revered as traits of the pioneers and of those who were devoted to a “never again” response to the Holocaust. In a nation where every man and woman was required to serve in the military, you had to be willing to accept a challenge and give it your all.

  Also, all the campers understood that what happened on the basketball court, or the soccer field, wasn’t a matter of life and death. Some of the kids who attended were the sons and daughters of men and women who had been killed in the Six-Day War. The kids had paid a terrible price as their country struggled to survive in a hostile corner of the world, yet they threw themselves into camp life determined to be happy despite their terrible losses. This lesson in the Israeli way of life, taught to us by children our own age, was a strong reinforcement for the values my parents had tried to impart over the years.

  Ten

  WILMETTE

  Nervous as hell whenever we entered new situations, my brothers and I were not our usual boisterous selves on the first day of school in Wilmette. Under normal circumstances we would have been anxious about leaving the family cocoon of Anshe Emet and enrolling at a big new school. However, our cheapskate father had made the situation even worse.

  Families who returned to America from Israel or Europe paid a premium for flights that got them home by Labor Day, to start school on time. Consequently, after Labor Day airfares dropped substantially. Always wanting a bargain, my father booked us to fly after the holiday. This meant we were “new” students who appeared three days after the start of class. We needed special attention to be seated in our classrooms, obtain books, and get caught up on lessons and homework.

  Unlike little Anshe Emet, where there was one class per grade, Romona had four or five for each grade level. As I took my seat I searched for my only friends in Wilmette. As luck would have it, all four of the boys from Locust Road had been assigned to different teachers. In another corner of the school, Rahm was quietly making his way through the day, adjusting to a new environment with his usual caution. Schoolboys used size and muscle to establish a pecking order, which inevitably put Rahm at a disadvantage. In time he would make up for his size by being funny and, if possible, cool. Unfortu
nately, because of my parents, cool often lay just out of reach. As he explained it, “I remember that what was cool then was brightly colored socks. The other kids had blue, red, yellow, and green and we had only black or white.” There was no way Rahm could talk my parents into getting him different socks. They would say that “it built character” to go against the fads. Rahm would say it just made him less popular and a little less secure.

  While Rahm worked hard at fitting in, Ari’s first day of school included a fight with another second grader who called him “nigger” because his skin had been browned by the Israeli sun. He hit the boy so hard he broke his glasses. When summoned to the school, my mother stuck up for Ari and was so charming that Harold Smith, the principal, became an ally, not an enemy. They agreed that the year to come would be “interesting.”

  This sort of “interesting” continued for much of the year. When some boys grabbed Rahm’s bike and said, “Niggers cannot ride here,” Ari responded by pulling one of the boys off the seat and beating him so badly that Rahm had to intervene to protect the little bigot. Ari also managed to locate and challenge the reigning alpha male in his second-grade classroom. Ari and Michael Alter fought each other at first and then, after establishing a truce, engaged in a long campaign of mutual mischief.

  Soon after we settled in Wilmette our mother found some kindred spirits and discovered that she could carry on her civil rights work in a new and provocative way. Essentially all white and pretty much devoid of poor people, Wilmette wasn’t the site of protests or marches for equal access to decent housing. However, it was the kind of place inhabited by the people who owned the substandard housing that was the subject of outrage in Chicago. When CORE activists checked Cook County records to discover the identities of the various slumlords who charged top-dollar rents for apartments in dilapidated buildings, one of the biggest offenders turned out to be a fellow named Braverman, who lived on Locust Road just four houses away from us.

  Led by my mother and some other suburban liberals, CORE picketed the Bravermans’ home several times in an attempt to bring the shame of the condition of his properties right to his doorstep. Among the pickets were some of Braverman’s tenants, who demanded he make long-neglected repairs and bring his buildings up to city standards. The tactic wasn’t original. CORE and other groups had marched on the home of Chicago school superintendent Willis many times. Wilmette, however, hadn’t seen this kind of action before. Not surprisingly, Mr. Braverman did not appreciate having a neighbor lead a mixed-race group of sign-carrying, slogan-shouting protesters to the sidewalk in front of his house. He emerged from his house shouting and waving his arms and bellowed at the protesters to stay off his property “or else!” My mother and the others knew all the laws relating to protests and private property and when the police rolled by they discovered that the picketers were doing nothing illegal.

  The “or else” shouted by Mr. Braverman wasn’t specific, but we found out what he meant a few months after the picketing ceased. The ostensible provocation involved our harmless German shepherd, Andele, and their dog, which was a little hairy thing that yapped at anything that moved. During our daily walks when we reached our block I would let go of Andele’s leash and let him run home free. One day I was running behind him when we encountered Mr. Braverman with his little dog. When Braverman barked at me to leash my dog I responded the way Emanuels always respond to self-appointed authorities: I ignored him. A dog-to-dog encounter ensued. After a little yelp, which may or may not have been prompted by Andele, Mr. Braverman accused Andele of biting his little precious. I walked away, ignoring his protestations.

  Soon after I got home the house practically shook with the sound of someone pounding on our front door. My mother answered and I heard a deep voice raised in anger and heard her speaking in the kind of measured tone you use when faced with an angry and dangerous person. I came racing downstairs to discover my mother facing down Mr. Braverman, who was outraged about how I let our dog attack his defenseless darling.

  Certain that nothing serious had happened with the dogs, I tried to stand beside my mother to argue with Mr. Braverman. The louder he shouted the more agitated I became in defense of myself, Andele, and the family honor. Then Mr. Braverman moved so his jacket came open and my mother could see the handle of a pistol he had tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

  My mother, fearing that I would badger this man into doing something violent, began to tell me to shut up and step away, and by then Ari and Rahm came to find out what the commotion was all about. As they crowded around, Mr. Braverman’s anger peaked and he said something like “You people have pushed me too far.”

  It was then that my mother turned, pushed us away from the door, and slammed it on our armed and possibly dangerous neighbor. Once she had us quieted, she explained that she had seen the gun and that sometimes it’s better to back away from a fight.

  Fortunately, Mr. Braverman and his family moved away from Locust Road a few months later. The tale of the dogs, the gun, and Mr. Braverman was quickly installed in the family legend under the heading “Stories About Zeke’s Big Mouth.”

  Mr. Braverman aside, the people we met in our new hometown shared many of the values we held, especially our focus on education. Wilmette’s elementary and middle schools fed into the prestigious New Trier High School district, which rivaled the best East Coast prep schools in the quality of its program and the number of its graduates who went on to the Ivy League.

  By the late 1960s there were two New Trier high schools and anyone who looked closely at the way enrollment in these schools was handled could see old-fashioned bigotry at work. The plan to separate Jewish newcomers from the children of old-line New Trier families was developed as the postwar influx of families filled the original New Trier High to capacity. By the early 1960s plans were set to build a second high school, called New Trier West. Students would be assigned to the schools on the basis of geography. The line separating the districts was gerrymandered—sometimes on a house-by-house basis—to make sure that most of the Jewish students from the western side of town would attend the new high school while the original was reserved for the older white Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities near the lakeshore.

  Eventually the North Shore would become so accepting that New Trier closed for the Jewish high holy days, something that seemed impossible when I attended. However, when we were young, the tension between Jewish newcomers and certain members of the established community required us to think about how we fit in. We identified with anyone and everyone who had to deal with exclusion or prejudice. Rahm, for example, became a close and protective friend to the Alanzo boy, the son of the first Mexican-American family to move into our neighborhood. The boy’s father was a preacher and it was obvious that he struggled to support a large family on a pastor’s salary. Jews and non-Jews alike picked on this kid until Rahm took him under his wing.

  Fortunately, most of the teachers in Wilmette were sensitive to early signs of trouble among their students and worked hard to make the schools welcoming and safe. Typical was my sixth-grade homeroom and social studies teacher, a novice named Robert Zahniser, who was as excited as he was nervous to face his first classroom full of eager faces. I can still see him, a skinny guy with close-cropped hair, a fading chin that accentuated a prominent Adam’s apple, desperately trying to bring order to the room by knocking on the desktop with his big Slippery Rock State College class ring. I was one of the overeager kids who always had their hands raised and called out “Oh, oh, oh!” to get his attention.

  All through the fall I used discussion periods in social studies to start debates on the Vietnam War, presidential politics, and other issues in the news. While he was not a doctrinaire conservative, Mr. Zahniser had what I in my eleven-year-old wisdom considered to be an unhealthy respect for authority figures. Where Vietnam was concerned, he seemed to believe that if America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts were convinced we needed to fight, we should trust them. I
could tie him in knots with questions like: Why do so many middle- and upper-class whites get out of the draft? With the big body counts reported every week, why aren’t we winning? Do the Vietnamese people really want us there?

  Zahniser, who actually broke into a sweat during these debates, still appreciated the energy we brought to the classroom. “I was relieved to have some students who jumped into everything so completely,” he said many years later. Zahniser saw the same quality of passionate, intense engagement in Ari, who showed up in his class when he was shifted from sixth grade to fourth.

  Ari’s hyperactivity and dyslexia continued to make schoolwork a torture, but he was relentless about doing his best. Zahniser went out of his way to encourage him. This effort included involving Ari in a summer-long psychology experiment that featured a collection of little white mice, a maze, and Pavlov’s theory of stimulus response. Along with a few other kids, Ari got to care for and train a rodent troupe that learned to run through the maze in response to a sound that they associated with a treat at the other end. Like Pavlov’s dogs, they responded even when no treat was to be found.

  The psych experiment was a special project but not something out of the norm for schools in Wilmette. Teachers there routinely went beyond the call of duty to help kids in any way possible. In Ari’s case, Robert Zahniser made sure to reward Ari’s great social skills—he was the most popular boy in his grade—and to find activities that would allow him to succeed without much reading and writing.