Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Page 2

  Six months before my mother was born, our maternal grandfather had joined the first big American protest against Hitler, a march of fifty thousand that helped unify Chicago’s Jews against the Nazis. Herman Smulevitz understood the way that bigotry can become violent. He was born in Russia in 1902, at a time when mobs of anti-Semites were attacking Jewish communities in murderous pogroms. We were told that he stowed away alone on a ship that brought him to America at the age of ten. After landing in New York he began searching for his father, who had abandoned his mother, remarried, and settled in Indiana. When he finally arrived at his father’s home, exhausted and bewildered by all he had experienced, Herman’s stepmother refused to take him in. He would forever call her the machashaifeh, which is Yiddish for “witch.”

  Big and strong for his age, and toughened by all he went through, young Herman eventually found refuge with an uncle in the Jewish community around Maxwell Street in Chicago. He worked odd jobs until he enlisted in the army near the end of World War I, where he saw combat only as a champion boxer. Nearly six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, he had a long reach and huge hands with fingers the size of Polish sausages. This physique, joined with his life experience on the streets of Chicago, made him plenty tough.

  After the war, Herman labored as a lumberjack and did track work for a railroad. In 1927 he married a Romanian immigrant named Sophie Lampert. In just six years they had three daughters—Shirley, Esther, and Marsha. A son named Shelden came in 1940, followed by Leslie in 1948. In this time Herman worked as a grocer and a union man who used his muscle, when necessary, to organize steel mills and meatpacking houses. Herman, who taught himself to read English, devoured newspapers and books and held strong opinions about what he read. He was a loud and sometimes profane man who would say almost anything to win an argument.

  As a child, Marsha Smulevitz stayed out of the fray, watching her older sisters argue in vain with their father and noticing that her younger brothers were often scolded in a way that seemed to diminish them. She feared her father, resented his bullying, and was devastated when he demanded that she give up the money she had saved for college to pay for her brother Shelden’s college tuition. She complied, but never got over losing her chance to continue her education after high school.

  But as much as my mother hated his authoritarian streak, she also listened to what her father said about standing up against injustice. The contradiction inherent in a bully who urges the oppressed to challenge their tormentors was obvious, but it did not make the message any less important. She sought out moments when she might experience the struggle for justice herself. The first chance came on a Thursday afternoon in December 1946. She heard that some whites were organizing to take action against black veterans who planned to move their families into a new public housing project that had been planned as an integrated community. She hopped on her brother’s bike and went to see what might happen.

  When my mother arrived at the apartment complex, hundreds of whites, mostly women who were homemakers, stood in the street to block two black vets who had arrived with moving trucks filled with their belongings. Dozens of police officers were at the site and they helped the drivers inch their trucks through the crowd of angry onlookers. When the trucks stopped, the police officers moved in to protect the men as they tried to unload their stuff. The crowd surged forward. Some of the women screamed threats and racist insults. Others threw rocks and dirt.

  Just a thirteen-year-old girl, my mother was shocked to see adult women shrieking with anger, and the police swinging batons to move them. When one of the trucks got stuck in the mud and its wheels began to spin helplessly, the driver switched off the motor and the men inside ran to a nearby office. Rocks rained on them and the vehicle. The truck’s windows were broken and eight people were injured in the melee as more stones flew and the officers pushed the crowd back.

  In that moment, my mother promised herself that she would always support anyone who sought equal rights. Back at home she kept what she saw that day to herself because she knew that her father would never approve of a girl taking such a risk. As she became an adult and went out into the world she developed some courage to go with her convictions. By the time I came along she was comfortable arguing with my grandfather even when he banged on the table and shouted. The noise he made when he slapped his big sausage hand down inspired me to call him “Big Banger.” Actually I pronounced it “Big Bang-ah,” but he did not frighten or intimidate me.

  Big Bangah got most excited when the subject was elections or party politics. He was a rabidly loyal Democrat, because the Democratic Party represented the workingman. He believed Franklin Roosevelt had literally saved America from the Great Depression and had, in World War II, defeated the most evil entity in history. A true Chicagoan of his generation, Herman believed that whatever policy the Democratic Party pursued, he was for it. If he could have, he would have controlled every vote in his family and delivered them to the Democrats each election day.

  My mother was more discerning. She was a liberal and a Democrat, but she had no patience for politicians of any party who blocked civil rights legislation. She also gave credit to those Republicans—Nelson Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, and others—who took the right position on civil rights.

  Any time my mother praised Dirksen, Rockefeller, or other open-minded, moderate Republicans she got a fierce response from Big Bangah. More than once these arguments developed such intensity that the sound and the fury could make one or both of them come a little unhinged.

  One of the most memorable of these battles would arise in the fall of 1966, as Republican Charles “Chuck” Percy challenged the incumbent Democratic senator Paul Douglas. Douglas was my grandfather’s kind of Democrat. He was an intellectual and a political activist who also was a friend of the workingman. He had taught economics at the University of Chicago before entering politics as an anti-machine candidate, in a losing campaign for mayor. A long shot, he had won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 with a campaign that stressed Truman-style anticommunism as well as civil rights, social programs, and public housing. Since then, he had been a Democratic stalwart, which included supporting John F. Kennedy’s decision to send “advisors” to Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the confrontation with the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese.

  As the 1966 election drew near, American deaths in Vietnam surpassed five thousand and troop levels approached four hundred thousand. Public opposition to the war was still small, but growing, with protests occurring in many cities. My mother, who was deeply affected by all this, told her father that she was thinking of voting for Percy, who opposed the war. Percy was the blond-haired, blue-eyed chief executive officer of a huge company called Bell & Howell. A product of the best local schools and the University of Chicago, he lived in the ultrarich lakeside suburb of Kenilworth, where Jews, Catholics, and blacks were even less welcomed than Democrats. Add all of his advantages to his GOP credentials and stir in the exclusionary taint of Kenilworth and Percy was a man of the ruling class whom Herman could not abide and he let my mother know it. We boys stood back and watched as our grandfather’s voice grew louder during a Friday night Shabbat dinner.

  “If you are going to vote for that man,” he finally said while swinging his arm to point at the door, “then get out of my fucking house!”

  My mother, insulted and furious, turned on her heel and slammed the door as she left. She was on the sidewalk, fuming and talking to herself, when she realized that she had just been ordered to leave her own home.

  On election day, my mother walked us all to the polling station, which was in a basement-level community center of some sort. We always joined my mother on the trip to the polling station, so she could show us democracy in action. She checked in with the registrar, who knew her by name, as is the tradition in Chicago politics to this day, and then brought us three brothers with her down the narrow hall that led to the voting machines. While we waited for a booth to open up, I remember Rahm
and me pulling the various switches on the instructional voting machine model. We then followed her to one of the machines, where we three boys crowded in around her. She pulled a big lever to close the curtain behind us.

  Inside that booth, Rahm, Ari, and I watched as our mother flipped all the switches along the Democratic Party column except for the one marked “United States Senator,” where she paused, and then flicked the little lever for Percy. I howled, “Mommy! You can’t! That’s Percy!”

  As my cries echoed through the polling station, I reached up to pull the Douglas lever and change my mother’s vote. She slapped my hand as if I had touched a hot burner on the stove and then quickly yanked on the red handle that recorded her votes. The curtain opened. The privacy of the booth evaporated, and around us people paused and just stared. My mother herded us like chickens, pushing with her hands until we went out the door and up the few steps to the street.

  Percy won, upsetting Douglas by 56 percent to 44 percent.

  For us, the result of the 1966 election provided more to argue about and debate, but no matter what was said, including “get out of this fucking house!” the hard feelings that arose in the heat of verbal battle always dissipated quickly. This was just the way things worked in my family, where you could speak with intense passion, and even insult your opponent, and no one took it too seriously or personally. Indeed, I soon learned that when you took the time to argue with someone it was a sign of respect for their ideas. Where I came from, just nodding and smiling when someone expressed views was the ultimate insult. If people weren’t yelling about politics in our house then they were arguing about music, or movies, or food. None of the excitement—not the yelling, the pounding on the table, or the slamming of doors—bothered me at all when I was little. It was sort of like growing up next to an airport runway, where everyone in the neighborhood becomes accustomed to the noise. In our home, everyone shouted and argued about everything.

  The exception to this rule was my father’s mother, whom we called Savta, which is Hebrew for “grandmother.” A small woman with silvery hair and big glasses, Penina Emanuel wore her hair in a stiff bob cut and her wrinkled face showed the signs of a life spent under the Mediterranean sun. She had been widowed in 1955 when doctors mis-diagnosed my paternal grandfather and namesake Ezekiel’s heart failure as influenza. I remember her as a serious and intelligent woman who wore neither makeup nor jewelry, except for a plain watch with a black leather strap on her left wrist. I don’t think I ever saw her wearing anything but a dark dress with long sleeves. Her shoes were always the same—black or brown with a single strap across the top that was fixed with a plain button.

  Old-fashioned in every way, Savta drank her tea Russian-style, in a glass that was placed in a silver-handled holder called a podstakannik. She was a neat freak who made her bed so carefully that it was hard to tell that anyone ever slept in it. Everything had to be in its place.

  The one great exception to these rules came when she got out the flour and other ingredients and let us help her make stuffed pierogies. On these occasions she would roll out the dough, we would press a cup down on it to cut a circle, and then we’d fold the dough over a dollop of meat, or mushroom, or some other stuffing she had prepared. During these escapades she didn’t mind that we were loud, sprayed flour all over the counters, floor, and our faces, and tussled over who got to handle the various ingredients. She may have even smiled amid the mayhem.

  These memories of cooking stand out because otherwise Savta rarely smiled and I’m not sure I ever heard her laugh out loud. From an adult perspective I can guess that she never got over the deaths of her husband and her eldest son, Emanuel—whose name she and Ezekiel adopted as the family’s last name in his memory—and the loss of her life in Israel. As a child I only knew that she was a quiet, almost ghostlike figure in our house who spent much of her time alone in her room—reading the Israeli newspapers or Hebrew books—and almost never talked. When she did appear she hovered in the background of things, flashing looks of disapproval at my mother, who would ignore them until she couldn’t and then demand that my father find someplace else for Savta to live.

  For his part my father cajoled and deflected. What was he going to do? He was stuck between two strong-willed women. One talked and the other didn’t, but they both communicated very clearly, issuing contradictory demands. In his usual kick-the-can way he refused to make a choice. He listened to our mother yell and did nothing. In the meantime Savta waged a quiet war of wills with our mother. She demanded that my mother refer to her as “Mrs. Emanuel” whenever she spoke of her in public and she stubbornly refused to learn to speak English, even though she was fluent in many languages and obviously understood English quite well.

  In a family where everyone seemed to be loudly protesting something at all times, Savta’s silent boycott of the English language was her form of resistance. She might come to America to live with her son and his wife, whom she never quite accepted, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to learn the language. She would speak Hebrew with her son and get along with my mother and us boys by speaking a little Yiddish, which we were expected to understand. To my mother’s dismay, at every meal she commanded us in Hebrew to stop talking and eat, which trained us to gobble down our food. This habit became even more ingrained as we boys grew older and our urgent need for calories and competitive drives led us to consume our meals with grabby abandon. He who reached first got the biggest piece of chicken or the last green pepper slice in the salad.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before Savta had her chance to carry out her silent protest in Chicago, she had to decide to leave Tel Aviv. She made this choice only after concluding that her only surviving child—my father—wasn’t likely to come back to live in Israel any time soon. In the spring of 1960, she wrote that she would be coming before the end of summer. This news was one of several factors that motivated my parents to move out of the cramped little apartment on Broadway. One of the others was a rat.

  After failing to make a go of it in Israel my parents returned to Chicago to find housing in scarce supply. With little money and no credit, they grabbed the first affordable place they could find—a crummy flat on Broadway.

  The entrance, stairs, and hallway of the building were filthy. Peeling paint left flakes on the floor and cracked plaster awaited repairs that were never made. Inside their apartment they dealt with more of the same. The walls hadn’t been cleaned—forget fresh paint—in many years. The wiring was balky, the faucets all dripped, the sinks were rust-stained, and when the winter wind blew it rattled the windows and sent a chill through the whole building. These conditions were commonplace in certain parts of 1950s Chicago, where the building codes were strict but the officials charged with enforcement used them to collect bribes or punish those who refused to pay. Month after month, my parents pestered the landlord about the cold, the broken fixtures, the many repairs left undone. My father was especially concerned about the possibility that children would eat the paint chips falling from the walls and get lead poisoning. Still the landlord, who was also a rabbi, did nothing.

  The last straw came on a night when my mother heard Rahm crying in his crib. Assuming he was hungry or needed to be changed, she got herself out of bed and turned on the light. Rahm was not alone. There in the crib was a sizable rat. In shock, and then anger, my mother shooed the thing away from her baby. As it crawled out of the crib and then ran across the floor she thought she saw another. She shouted for my father, who came running. He checked my brother to make sure he had not been bitten—he hadn’t—and then listened as my mother told him what she saw. He banged around to make sure no rats were still lurking in the apartment, but they had obviously escaped through the same hole that had let them in.

  Although my mother and father had already started planning a move, the rats made the matter urgent. Thanks to several raises in his salary, my father had a bit more money to spend. He signed a lease on a larger apartment just around the corner o
n West Buena Avenue. The four-story brick building was divided into eight big units with high ceilings and tall windows. Our apartment, which was on the second floor, came with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and, off the kitchen, a third bedroom with its own bath. Designed as a maid’s quarters, it would be perfect for my grandmother. She booked passage to America at the end of the summer of 1960.

  That summer, my mother helped form a neighborhood chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which months earlier had gained national attention with its support for sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South. These protests, which went on for days, inspired support around the country. With me by her side and Rahm in a carriage, my mother joined a picket line at a Woolworth’s store in Chicago. She was one of just a few whites who joined a crowd of black patrons inside who occupied the lunch counter for hours on end, to show their support for what was happening in the South.

  For my mother, a bus ride and an hour or two on a picket line was a rather routine activity and since I started attending protests with her at a very tender age, it seemed normal to me, too. I thought nothing of the fact that we were among very few white people in these crowds. I did notice there were not a lot of other kids at these demonstrations.

  When we got home from these protests we fell into a fairly typical domestic routine. My mother got dinner ready for when my father returned from the hospital. She cooked the usual things—chicken, pasta, lots of vegetables—but her best dishes were kugel and cheesecake. One of the things she never served was fresh milk, because she believed it was contaminated by the radioactive strontium 90 in fallout from atomic bomb tests. If we ever drank milk it was the powdered stuff that came out a sort of bluish white when you added water and stirred it with a spoon. This is probably why to this day none of us brothers really likes milk nor drinks it regularly.