Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  While my mother enjoyed everything about her life in Israel, my father struggled to find satisfying work in a country that was overrun with doctors. When a job in a hospital turned out to be little more than a record-keeping assignment, he accepted a national health service post serving five frontier kibbutzes. The post came with a jeep, a driver, a pistol that did not work, and a schedule that required him to be in a different little clinic every day. Most of his patients had nothing wrong with them but came looking for a letter authorizing them to travel to the city for tests, or a specialist’s care. This allowed them to get transport for a day of shopping or sightseeing in Tel Aviv. When he turned them down, they complained to his boss. Others had grown accustomed to getting prescriptions for antibiotics even when they did not need them. When my father prescribed rest but no medicine for viral illnesses, they complained as well. His supervisor told him to just write the prescriptions so that the complaints would stop.

  The one person who did not complain to my father about her medical condition, although she could have, was my mother. She arrived in Israel pregnant and was thrilled by the prospect of becoming a mother. She experienced very little morning sickness or other discomforts, and often said she never felt better than when she was expecting. But like every woman in the last trimester, she needed the bathroom during the night.

  Nighttime bathroom trips became trickier when a bulb in the ceiling light fixture burned out. My father, who is utterly incompetent (even negligent) when it came to the simplest household repairs, never got around to replacing it. After stubbing her toe for the umpteenth time, she got tired of asking. She got a chair, dragged it into the hallway, placed it under the light, and climbed up. As she loosened the bulb a shower of coins fell out of the fixture.

  She had discovered a cache of nineteenth-century forty-franc French gold coins—people called them Napoleons—that my grandfather had hidden many years before. The discovery surprised my grandmother, who remembered hearing something about her husband hiding the coins. He had died without telling her where they were, and after a brief search she had given up looking for them. Now that a small fortune in coins had been found, my parents and grandmother put more than a little effort into looking for more. They found a few more in the ceiling lights of the pharmacy, but with all their tapping on walls, peering inside electrical outlets, and drilling of holes, they failed to turn up the mother lode, which they suspected lurked somewhere in the building.

  With gold falling on her head and her baby arriving right on schedule on September 6, my mother was content. She and my father named me Ezekiel Jonathan Emanuel—Ezekiel to honor my grandfather and Jonathan because my mom liked it. Unhappy with the idea of calling a baby by a prophetic Old Testament name, my mother took to calling me Jonny. In the back of her mind she also thought that this name would serve me better if we ever moved back to America. It was 1957, after all, a conformist time when names like John and William were the norm and something as exotic as Ezekiel would provoke a lot of teasing.

  Israel would always be our second home. As boys we returned frequently for the summers. Rahm and Ari both spent time in Israel as young adults—Rahm after college and Ari during high school. I would take my eldest daughter there when she was six months old for her first trip, and then when her sisters arrived, we would often spend a month during the summers in an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean so they could learn Hebrew in an ulpan, jump the waves, shop in the markets, and soak up Israeli life and culture. After graduating from college, my eldest would spend a year in Israel learning Hebrew, studying how to care for the terminally ill, and making friends with peace activists from both Palestinian and Israeli sides. All three brothers and our families would finally reunite in Israel for the bar mitzvahs of Rahm’s and Ari’s eldest sons in 2010.

  For a while I was raised by the little village that was our apartment building. Everyone fussed over me and a young woman named Zeeva became my regular sitter for the times when my mother and father both worked. As Zeeva would remember, I was a very vocal and curious baby. I took my first steps at nine months and was running a few weeks later. At around this time they would put me outside on the balcony of the apartment with little bowls filled with steamed vegetables for me to gnaw on. I would stand with one hand on the ironwork of the balcony and wave a piece of broccoli while delivering a lecture like a Roman emperor to anyone who would listen.

  Esther, my mother’s unmarried older sister, came to help my mother with her new baby and she too fell in love with the life in Israel’s city by the sea. We might have all stayed, permanently, if Israel had more to offer a young doctor with my father’s interests and ambition. He wanted to be a pediatrician, but Israel needed general practitioners, so that was what he was asked to do. The longer he served as a GP for frontier kibbutzes the less likely he was to get into pediatrics. His prospects grew even worse when the government sent him to a military outpost near Jerusalem to care for a contingent of police and soldiers.

  The base was on an isolated hilltop near Jerusalem called Mount Scopus. All the surrounding territory was controlled by Jordan, which meant the outpost was accessible only with the aid of United Nations peacekeepers. Israeli convoys were permitted to supply the base but the Jordanian troops periodically barred them and gunfire was common between them and the Israeli Defense Forces. Every once in a while the Jordanians wounded one of the Israeli sentries and it would be up to my father to scamper out to get him and then fix him up. The Jordanians suspected that the Israelis were secretly fortifying their positions, which was against the agreement governing the situation. In fact, the IDF troops were working every night on fortifications, but given the gunfire coming from the other side, you could hardly blame them.

  While my father was there, he came under regular gunfire and risked his own life scurrying into the line of fire to help the wounded. Sometimes this happened in the middle of the break periods when the troops would make up teams and kick a soccer ball around a patch of dirt. My father, who was usually in the game, would run to the wounded player and help carry him to safety. Since he was acting as a medic, the snipers left him alone even when he returned to rescue the ball.

  Because he spoke fluent English my father also sometimes served as liaison with George Flint, a Canadian officer who oversaw the UN peacekeepers. Flint came every day with mail during a two-month period when the Jordanians blockaded Mount Scopus and my father and all the other Israelis were trapped there. At one point, he told my father he had been cleared to return to Canada but was staying on to arrange to ship a car home, duty-free.

  Thanks to Flint and the intervention of higher-level UN officials, the blockade was ended and my father was able to return home to discover that the two-month-old baby he had left behind was now six months old. Sporadic Jordanian attacks on Mount Scopus continued, however. In May 1958, Lieutenant Colonel Flint was killed by a Jordanian sniper as he waved a white flag and tried to escort some wounded Israelis to safety.

  The worry my father’s deployment caused my mother, the stress he experienced being separated from us, and the difficulty he faced in his effort to find work as a pediatrician began to weigh heavily on them. My father tried to start a private practice, adding this work to his job for the health ministry, but Tel Aviv already had too many physicians and he saw few patients. When my mother became pregnant with Rahm in early 1959 they began to think hard about their options. Israel did not really need another pediatrician, especially one practicing outside of his field in order to just get by. At the same time, opportunity remained in America, where medicine, science, and technology were reaching new heights. He might even be able to train in a subspecialty like pediatric kidney disease.

  A return to America offered my mother a chance to be close to her family, old friends, and familiar comforts, but ironically enough, she was the one who was resistant and reluctant about returning to Chicago. In her fantasies, she refused to leave Tel Aviv and ran away with friends to make her point to her husb
and. But in the end, she understood why he wanted to go back to the States and agreed to it. It helped her to know that my father was hoping to come back someday. In fact, it seemed almost inevitable that he would become an experienced pediatric specialist in America and then, when conditions were right, return to Israel with a notable academic reputation, forcing the Israeli medical establishment to give him a spot where he could conduct research as well as see patients.

  Four

  AMERICA

  In 1959, Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital welcomed my father. He was soon a leader in the dialysis program, and an attending physician in the pediatric wards. Ambitious and eager to make money, my father searched the blocks south and west of the hospital for a convenient spot where he could see private patients but also get back to the hospital quickly when he was needed. A tiny storefront that could have suited a candy shop became the home of his one-man general practice. The neighborhood, which was about twenty-five blocks south of downtown, had changed dramatically in the previous decade as upwardly mobile Jewish families moved out and poorer black families moved in. Since several doctors had left along with their patients, the area needed physicians.

  In the beginning, the patients may have been taken aback by this young Jewish doctor with a thick foreign accent. They also had to get accustomed to the idea that he was not available on a predictable schedule. If, for example, the staff at the hospital called to ask for his help, he would have to close his office and rush over there. But those patients who did get to see him at that storefront clinic found my father was the kind of doctor who offered good care and as much respect as he received. Chicago was a melting pot of immigrants, and my father spoke four languages well and several others sufficiently so that he could communicate with people of many nationalities. Consequently, he quickly became a popular doctor in a city of many immigrant families. He proved himself by being right with almost every diagnosis, and by being fair about payment, which meant that his patients paid only what they could, and some paid nothing at all. Either way, they got the same level of care and, when necessary, house calls, hospital visits, and after-hours research by my father in the medical library if a difficult case required it. My father welcomed these tough cases because they broke up the monotony that can come with seeing one patient with an ear infection or strep throat after another. They required a little detective work and sharp action when a definitive diagnosis was finally made.

  A good example arose when one mother brought her two-and-a-half-year-old son to the office with a fever, cough, headache, and blurred vision. The boy, whose name was George, had both tuberculosis and meningitis. The meningitis, which could cause brain damage and death, was the most urgent problem. My father suspected it was caused by a fungus called cryptococcus. Lab results proved he was right and a search of the literature turned up just a few cases when patients were cured with a new drug—amphotericin B—developed from bacteria found in the soil along the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The drug was not commercially available but my father somehow managed to get it and George was saved.

  George, whom my father followed for years, became the subject of one of dozens of case studies and papers he published in professional journals. This academic output was quite remarkable for a doctor who worked seventy hours a week seeing patients in the office, at the hospital, and in their homes. The variety and pace of work suited my father, but the pay was low and as our family grew he longed to spend more time at home. He solved both these problems by leaving the hospital and practice on the South Side and partnering with another physician in an office that was much closer to our home and had a wealthier clientele. He got privileges at most of Chicago’s North Side community hospitals and began seeing newborns in the maternity ward who became patients in his practice. He still worked hard, often seeing two dozen patients in an afternoon when his partner saw no more than ten. This happened in part because my father was filled with kinetic energy. Entering the exam room, he would minimize salutations with the parents and focus immediately on the children and the presenting problem. His typical visits were so short the nurses at the hospitals called him “Speedy Gonzales.” Despite his speed, and because of his openness and charm, his reputation grew as many mothers requested him personally.

  When he was working, my father’s style was very relaxed and matter-of-fact but warm. A little blood, a little vomit, or a little crying was nothing to him. But if he could avoid tears, he made an effort to do so. For example, he often used a little misdirection, like an old-fashioned magician, to remove stitches without a child realizing it. “Are you tough enough to do this without crying?” he would ask. While he talked, and the child was screwing up his courage, my father had already begun to work. Before they could answer the threads would be out and he would delight his patient by declaring, “You did it!”

  He taught parents to trust their instincts, be attentive, and enjoy their children because they grow up fast. One mother told me that my father showed up on the maternity ward, gave her son the once-over, and said, “Hug, love, squeeze your baby.” Desperately nervous about how to handle her first child, she said, “That’s it?” My father answered, “You’re going to be fine, and he will be, too.”

  The mother and father who told that story about Ben Emanuel’s five-word introduction to parenting discovered that his advice, and the Spock-style confidence he showed in all parents, made perfect sense. They made him the pediatrician for their first son, and two more children, who all stayed in his practice until they became adults. Over time I would hear many similar stories.

  Dr. Benjamin Emanuel’s no-nonsense style helped him build one of the biggest practices in the city. Most of his patients were middle-class, but many were so poor that he gave away a great many free checkups, doses of penicillin, and free samples of other medications he received from drug company representatives. The only rich or famous people he saw in his office tended to be big-league ballplayers who played games at nearby Wrigley Field and lived in the neighborhood. He knew so little about American sports that he had no idea that Billy Williams and Ron Santo played for the Cubs and he called the football star Dick Butkus “Dick Bupkis.” (He wasn’t even aware enough to use his connections to finagle tickets for a game or two.) The “Bupkis” kids and all the others got my father up and going in the morning. He loved talking to children of every age. To him, they were never boring.

  Although he still planned to go back to Israel one day, he liked everything about his life in Chicago and allowed himself to think about climbing the economic ladder. The American dream, as he saw it, included the chance to work hard at something you loved, and to provide for your family. He wanted financial security, proper schooling for his kids, and a few of the things, like travel, theater, and music, that he always considered essential to a full life. He may have been happy to serve the poor, but he did not think it was necessary to be one of them.

  My father’s first big-ticket purchase was a fancy hi-fi—one of those big stand-alone console models—which he bought so he could listen to classical music records. He put the stereo and the vinyl albums in his little study alcove off the living room. After declaring that this was the one pleasure he allowed himself, he barred us from touching the stereo system or going into his office.

  At the time it seemed a bit strange that our father never taught us much about music or skiing, which he had enjoyed in Switzerland. Later he would explain that the money and time required for ski trips just weren’t available when we were young. And when it came to music, he just could not imagine how his three hyperactive boys would manage to sit still long enough to listen to a prelude, let alone a whole symphony.

  To his credit, our father did eventually introduce us to chess, which he played extremely well. These after-dinner and Sunday afternoon games were played either at the dining room table or in the living room, where the board was set up on the round, white marble coffee table. Our father sat on the edge of the sofa and we plopped ourselves on the floor.


  These chess games were not idle fun. My father did not believe in falsely building his sons’ self-esteem by purposely letting us win or larding on the excessive praise. He played to win and teach us by real competition. Sometimes he would simply stop the game and then show us, with quickly moving hands, how the next dozen moves would inevitably lead us to defeat.

  “You will move here. I will move there,” he would say as his thick fingers quickly and nimbly shuffled the knight, bishop, pawns, and other pieces, showing us how the game would “inevitably” evolve. “And then this, and then I would checkmate.”

  During these demonstrations he would repeatedly admonish us with two messages. “Think three moves ahead!” he would say every game. “Imagine all your opponent’s possible responses before you make a move. Think about how I am going to respond if you move your knight that way.” He would then show us a few possible counter-measures he might take to thwart our strategy. “Play the moves out in your mind before you move your piece,” he said.

  The second imperative was easier for us to learn: “Remember what Napoleon said: Offense is the best defense.”

  My brothers and I never checked whether Napoleon ever uttered such a sound bite, but we surely absorbed it. And it certainly fit with our personalities and natural tendency to take the “fight” side of the fight-or-flight response to danger. Hyperactive and distractible, none of us ever got good enough at chess to even come close to beating him. For my father, chess was about seeing problems in a sophisticated way and learning to plan multiple moves ahead. These games—and my father’s urgings—reinforced our natural tendency to be aggressive in whatever we set out to do. Winning became so important that we each deliberately sought out the particular hobbies, sports, and career interests that fit our abilities and in which we could excel. Life was about competition, and if you couldn’t finish at the top in one pursuit, you found the game where your talents allowed you to win.