Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  Worse than the physical punishment were the long silences that followed. Time passes slowly for children. My mother could seethe for hours, sometimes even for days, after breaking. The mix of feelings we experienced when this was going on—guilt, confusion, anxiety, loss—was excruciating. Our mother’s dark mood cast a pall over the entire household. Worst of all, we felt powerless to affect it. No apology, dandelion bouquet, or handmade card would make her smile if she wasn’t ready and willing.

  Years later my mother would tell us that for every time she lost her temper or retreated in silence, there were a hundred moments when she was afraid we would push her over the edge and she managed to keep her cool. Of those times when she whacked us or gave us the silent treatment, she would say she was protecting us from something worse. “You boys would drive anyone crazy,” she would say. “Believe me.”

  As adults we were able to imagine some of the pressure she felt, especially in the period when she had three hyperactive preschool kids and one judgmental mother-in-law, all jammed into a three-bedroom apartment. Savta could not have been much help. She wasn’t particularly interested in taking care of us, and she often voiced her disapproval of her son’s marriage and criticized my mother’s efforts to be a good wife and parent. She once offered my mother ten thousand dollars to leave our father. My mother never figured out if this was a joke or not.

  A lonely widow deprived of her lifelong friends and familiar surroundings in Tel Aviv, Savta would not have been happy in Chicago under any circumstances. As the overprotective mother of one living child, she wouldn’t be satisfied with anyone who married her son. Benjamin Emanuel could have proposed to Golda Meir and Savta would have found something lacking. In Marsha Emanuel, she believed she saw an ambitious American who would weigh her precious son down with too many children and grandiose expectations for the privileged kind of life she saw on American television. Big cars and suburban houses represented to Savta a trap that would prevent her son from returning to Tel Aviv to live. And she was certain that his wicked wife would force him to choose this American life over Israel, which meant that she would have to accept either exile in the United States or life without her son in Tel Aviv.

  What Savta did not understand was that my father was the one most devoted to the American dream of a home in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, and a climb up the social ladder. He liked both the challenges and the opportunities of working in the country with the most technologically advanced medicine. He also enjoyed the culture, comforts, and opportunities that surrounded him in the richest country in the world. Sure, he loved his homeland, and he imagined that he might one day return. But it was my mother who longed for Israel the most. After all, in the short time she had lived there she had had more close friends than she had ever known in America and gold had literally rained down on her from above.

  Three

  THE EMANUELS

  The story of the gold begins in Odessa, on the Black Sea, long before my mother and father were born and, indeed, before the family was even called by the name Emanuel. As pogroms and civil wars blazed across the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to Western Europe, America, and to what was then called Palestine. Today, millions of families in America and around the world can trace their stories back to these displaced Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. To others, these events can seem like distant history. To us they are both shrouded in faded memories and deeply personal dramas filled with danger and heroism and lessons that echo in our own attitudes and perspectives.

  I was told that my father’s relatives left their home in Odessa in 1905 after selling substantial landholdings. With their fortune converted to gold coins and diamonds, they immigrated to Jerusalem. At that time my ancestors went by the name of Auerbach. My father’s father, who was also named Ezekiel, opened a pharmacy financed by an old friend from Odessa who was passing through Palestine on his way to settle in Rome. The pharmacy supported his wife; his eldest son, Emanuel; and the younger Benjamin, who was born in Israel in 1927. Ever suspicious and fearful, Ezekiel hid away the gold coins and jewels against an uncertain future. He told no one, not even his wife, Penina, where he put them.

  While not political activists, the Auerbachs were Zionists who supported the ultimate creation of a Jewish state that would be a bulwark against the anti-Semitism and terror they had seen in Europe. Before this dream could be realized, they and other Jewish pioneers who had come to Palestine would have to wait out the British occupation, which had begun at the end of World War I. The Jews and Arabs of Palestine both resented British rule, but during a period that ran from 1930 into the 1940s the Arabs were the most violent in their opposition to both the occupation and to the Jewish immigrants who came fleeing anti-Semitism, oppression, and then Adolf Hitler. Thousands of Arabs and hundreds of Jews died in clashes with each other and with the British authorities. One of them was my father’s older brother Emanuel.

  In November 1933, the same month when Marsha Smulevitz was born in Chicago, Emanuel Auerbach was standing on the edge of a conflict between protesters and police in Jerusalem when a bullet ricocheted off the pavement and struck his leg. The wound itself was not life-threatening, but it soon became infected. With effective antibiotics, yet to be developed, Emanuel would have lived. Instead he died of the infection. He was buried in the Mount of Olives Cemetery, which is in East Jerusalem and overlooks the Old City. Soon after their son’s death, Ezekiel and Penina changed the family name to honor their son. On a visit to Israel in 2010, my eldest daughter and I, with the help of an ancient Arab caretaker of the cemetery and a right-wing Jewish settler cabdriver, eventually located the grave, which no one in the family had seen since at least 1948.

  Ezekiel and Penina never really recovered from Emanuel’s death. My brothers and I learned this not from my father but from people who knew him as a child. They described my father’s parents as serious, almost grim people who devoted themselves to their business and lived very quietly. As my father’s grade school classmate and lifelong friend Batya Carmi recalled, “He grew up as an only child but under the dark cloud of his dead brother.”

  To slip from under that cloud, Ben spent as much time as possible away from his parents’ store and the apartment. Little interested in academics, but sociable and friendly, he was more like Ari and Rahm than me. Even he would admit that in school he “tried to get the most for the least effort,” which was something he would later say many times about Rahm, another second child.

  We boys loved to hear about our parents’ childhood, and storytelling was frequently part of our bedtime ritual. We visited my parents’ bed, en masse, just about every night. Usually our mom read a chapter from a book, but whenever we could get our father and mother to tell us stories from their own lives we were especially attentive.

  In later years I was struck with how world events affected the course of my father’s life. As a boy he lived at one of the great flashpoints of history and, while he escaped the Holocaust, he nevertheless knew what it was like to be the subject of violent hatred. He also participated in the founding of Israel and its development as a frontier nation. But as important as these aspects of his life were, my brothers and I were far more intrigued by the tales that revealed our father as a shovav like us.

  The Ben Emanuel we learned to know from those stories was a class clown, a middling student, a fantastic dancer, and an avid movie fan. (In one of his stories his best Shabbat white shirt was ripped to shreds in the frenzy outside the theater prior to the local premiere of Flash Gordon.) He told us about long days spent at the beach, lots of dances, and a class costume party where he dressed up as Charlie Chaplin. From then on his nickname was Charlie, which stuck, so much so that Batya still calls him that.

  Together, the stories they painted revealed a footloose, Huck Finn kind of kid in a sunny Tel Aviv that was more small town than big city. It was Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mediterranean, a place where a boy could roam from the shore to the markets to the cin
ema and get into mischief without encountering any serious trouble.

  Hovering over it all, of course, was the tension between the Jews and the Arabs and their shared anger at their British overseers. The bigotry that simmered in Tel Aviv was both conceptual and personal. For example, when my father’s aunt, a nurse, married an Arab doctor she had met in a hospital, the couple went to great lengths to obscure their relationship. The doctor, who eventually became a high official in the health-care system, actually hid behind closed doors when people visited his home because both sides—Jews and Arabs—suspected he was some sort of spy. The man, whom my father knew only as “Dr. Ayoub,” eventually played a key role in his life, but for years he lived in the shadows.

  Dr. Ayoub’s fears were well-founded. Both the Jews and the Arabs operated secret security organizations that acted with deadly force, and he correctly feared assassination from both sides. More commonly, Arabs and Jews clashed spontaneously in the streets, with small incidents escalating into brawls that sometimes brought gunfire and fatalities. A smart kid who kept his wits about him could flee before getting caught up in these melees. My father succeeded at this, escaping the fate that befell his brother in order to serve the Zionist cause in a much more prosaic way—clearing land at a distant kibbutz.

  Like many other young Israeli men, my father waited out World War II, nursing dreams of a better future that included a sovereign Jewish state. And like most of his peers, he joined a paramilitary group that was preparing for a war of independence. His most dangerous activities involved handing out literature, and plastering political posters on the walls of city buildings at night. The only violence he experienced was when a British officer on horseback caught him trying to paste a propaganda poster on a building. The man beat him with a stick, giving him the only wounds—a series of bruises—he ever suffered in the Zionist cause.

  When World War II ended and negotiations over Palestine’s future began, my father looked for a chance to escape the shadow of his brother and see something more of the world. Restrictions imposed by the British authorities made it almost impossible for young men to travel abroad except to study in disciplines unavailable locally. Medicine was one of those disciplines. My father applied to study at several medical schools in the United States and Europe. Given his lackluster grades, his acceptance at the rather exclusive University of Lausanne in Switzerland was a bit of a surprise.

  Whenever my father’s stories focused on his life after adolescence, Ari, Rahm, and I would pay extra-close attention because this was when the juicy stuff, full of obstacles, adventure, and sex, entered the picture. A good example was his passage to Lausanne. In 1946 the British navy policed shipping in the Mediterranean and often sent migrating Jews back to their ports of embarkation. A few captains used daring tactics to evade or outrun the blockade. More than once these races ended with a ship aground on the shore and people leaping into the water and swimming in the Mediterranean to beaches. Against this backdrop, our father very nervously boarded a Romanian ship docked in Haifa for a voyage to Marseilles. His suitcase contained just two suits and a wool coat. In his wallet were a few British pounds. Just before the lines were cast off, police officers stormed onto the ship demanding to see Benjamin Emanuel. When they found him, they took him ashore to a little military post. Terrified, my father was sure he would be denied permission to leave. Instead the officers explained that a friend, Dr. Ayoub, had asked them to make sure he was treated well. Relieved, my father assured them that he was quite happy and returned to the ship. The voyage to Marseilles took more than four days, and traveling to Lausanne by train across the war-ravaged countryside took the better part of another week.

  Benjamin Emanuel arrived at the medical school in March. He had no place to live, and was months behind the other students. Somehow he managed to persuade school officials to let him try to catch up with his classmates. He found shelter with a local family but this arrangement was only temporary. “They wouldn’t let you bring women home,” he explained, slyly. In a matter of weeks he found a new place to live with an eclectic group of ten fellow students—French, Caribbean, South American—who occupied most of a small apartment building. It was an easygoing group that shared chores like cooking and cleaning. As my father would recall, the toughest job involved keeping the coal-fired stoves that heated the place supplied with fuel that was stored in the basement.

  Adopting a regimen that would see him through his entire education, my father rose every morning at six and studied in his room until noon. In the beginning, he focused on learning French, since all of his classes would be conducted in this language and he knew none of it at all. With the help of the French Reader’s Digest and a translation dictionary he would pass his first oral exam—which was given six weeks after his arrival—with little difficulty.

  The six-hour workday plan left my father with plenty of time to go to movies, hang out in cafés, date young women, and generally have fun—or, as he would tell us, “live the life of Riley.” The apartment in Lausanne became the scene of many parties, late-night political debates, competitive chess matches, and romantic escapades. Whenever he brought up the subject of Claire, the beautiful Swiss girlfriend who almost became his wife, my mother gave him a look that instantly changed the story line. But she did let him tell us—many times over the years—the famous “breast cream” story.

  The tale begins with a young woman who wanted to win a local beauty contest but was worried that her breasts were too small. With their very best “Trust us, we’re doctors” demeanor my father and his suite mates told her about a new cream they were developing at the medical school that could augment her chance for victory. It was such special stuff that it had to be applied “just so,” which meant that she would have to drop by the apartment every day for weeks so these would-be doctors could carefully and methodically rub it in. She agreed to the plan. The cream was only ordinary moisturizer, but after weeks of the treatment, when she actually won the contest, their “patient” credited the special cream.

  In the breast cream story, and most of his other memories, my father is usually the instigator for adventures that involve a host of characters from different backgrounds and cultures. He liked and admired most of his fellow students, except for the Americans. Part of his feeling stemmed from the fact that they were rich. Living off the GI Bill and a very favorable postwar exchange rate, the American students could afford cars and meals in restaurants. The other source of my father’s resentment was the feeling that they studied “like parrots,” memorizing facts without mastering concepts. Most performed poorly on their exams and many were still in Lausanne, acting like perpetual students, long after my father graduated.

  My father’s graduation was delayed by Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and an escapade that made him seem to us like a character from a James Bond movie. The tale began as Zionists prepared for the war by expanding the paramilitary organizations of Haganah and Irgun. Both secretly bought arms on the world market and recruited Jews, especially those who had fought in World War II, to help acquire them. In February 1948 my father and three friends were approached in Lausanne by an operative who went by the name Ben David. He wanted them to accompany him on an arms-purchasing mission. My father instantly volunteered and joined the others for a train trip to Vienna and then on to Prague, where Czech officials were prepared to sell thousands of World War II surplus rifles to the Jewish paramilitary.

  Secret negotiations had led to an agreement on the shipment, which would be made in defiance of a United Nations ban against the sale of military hardware to either Arabs or Jews in the former Mandate of Palestine. Officials all over Europe were on the alert to stop this kind of trade. My father and his mates could be arrested and imprisoned at any moment.

  Their first stop was the Rothschild Hospital, which was on a street called Währinger Gürtel in the sector of Vienna controlled by U.S. forces. Once home to a neurological institute headed by Viktor Frankl, the hospital occupied a mass
ive five-story building that had been built in the 1870s and subsequently expanded to serve a growing Jewish population. Shut down as Jews were rounded up during the Holocaust, it became after the war a center for displaced persons. Tens of thousands of Jews from around Europe had transited through the building on their way to Israel.

  On the day my father and his nervous friends arrived at the hospital they were told to go to the top floor and knock on a closed door. It opened into a room where a couple of men sat at a table. Surrounding them were piles of banknotes from various countries, stacked from floor to ceiling. The quantities were enormous and must have amounted to tens of millions of dollars.

  Ben David was handed a big valise full of this cash, which would travel with the group to Prague. There they would meet their Czech contacts, confirm that an additional sum of money had been transferred by wire to pay for the arms, and inspect the weapons. They were also given a map showing various banks in the city and told to look in the potted plants in front of each one for a cache of diamonds that had supposedly been hidden by some wealthy Jewish man before he was captured by the Nazis.

  The train route north to Prague covered about two hundred and fifty miles. Inspectors at the border checked the passports, travel documents, and belongings of some passengers who were seemingly selected at random. My father and his mates were passed over. Once they arrived in Prague, they found a room for the night, and rested anxiously with their valuable luggage. In the morning, on February 25, 1948, they located the banks and searched all the potted plants, but found no gems in the dirt. When Ben David then tried to make contact with the Czechs, he discovered that during the day, the communists had completed a bloodless coup. All the officials who had agreed to the arms sale were forced out of power. Anyone who had come to Prague to do business with them would be wise to escape. Ben David and his confederates did just that, catching the first available train and crossing the border before it was closed.