Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Page 7

  While my father gradually became one of the more popular pediatricians on the North Side of Chicago, my mother was the center of our days. Happily, she found on West Buena Avenue a kindred spirit in another young Jewish mother named Carol Glass. Like my parents, Carol and Bill Glass had three sons. They were roughly the same age as Rahm, Ari, and me, so they were ideal playmates.

  I’m told I introduced myself to her at a small playground near our apartment. She was sitting on a bench watching her two older kids on the swings and slides while my mother sat on another, watching me and Rahm. I walked over and handed Mrs. Glass an orange and asked her to peel it for me because “my mommy cannot do it.” In fact, she had told me to do it for myself. Mrs. Glass thought this was hilarious. She and my mother became friends on the spot and formed an alliance that made mothering just a little easier.

  What little spare time my mother had she devoted to civil rights activism. My father solved the problems of individuals. When a black or immigrant family was facing discrimination and couldn’t get a white pediatrician to see them, my father would gladly care for the children—and reduce his charges or simply waive the fees if they were poor and couldn’t afford it. By contrast, when my mother saw discrimination she began organizing. Her tendency was to start a political movement, protest, and make systemic change. I think as we grew up, we boys became frustrated by our father’s approach of repeatedly addressing the same problem posed by many individuals, and learned from our mother to devote ourselves to addressing larger social issues.

  Early on, my mother opened our apartment for meetings of the local CORE chapter, which attracted dozens of blacks and whites, many of whom were Jewish. CORE pushed for integration at public facilities like city beaches and for access to housing. But with Willis Wagons dotting the landscape and schools in white areas emptying out, education remained the movement’s primary focus.

  Looking back at it decades later, the stubborn attitudes of local officials seem truly astounding. Superintendent Benjamin Willis, for example, refused to acknowledge that the schools were segregated even though the district had kept the races separate for years. He would not say whether he thought racial separation in public education was a good idea or a bad one. However, every day seemed to bring new revelations of the district’s inequities and more protests at administrative offices and school buildings. On certain occasions, when civil rights leaders called for boycotts, schools in many neighborhoods closed for lack of students.

  Officials responded defensively to protests and criticisms, digging in for what promised to be a long fight on behalf of the status quo. All the signs suggested the Chicago Public Schools system would be in turmoil for many years. My parents, who wanted us to learn Hebrew in case we moved back to Israel, expected to send us to a private Jewish day school. Still, they recognized the value of the city schools and committed themselves to the cause of change for the benefit of everyone in the city.

  All this activity was a direct reflection of my mother’s deeply held moral code, a set of beliefs that was born in her father’s labor union activism, reinforced by her bike trip to that first housing protest, and hardened by the discrimination she felt, saw, and read about in the newspapers. Most Jews who joined the civil rights movement were motivated at least in part by their own ongoing, personal experience with prejudice and bigotry. In Chicago, 1961 began with a midnight bombing at the doorway of the Anshe Emet synagogue, which was just a few blocks from our home. Although we weren’t members, we attended Anshe Emet on the weeks when we did not go to the small shul my grandfather had helped to found in nearby Albany Park. The blast at Anshe Emet damaged the synagogue building and broke more than a hundred windows in the neighborhood. No one was hurt, but the crime, which was never solved, reminded everyone that hatred and anti-Semitism were alive in the world and good people were called to stand against it. This imperative lent a sense of purpose and urgency to the organizing meetings that took place at our apartment.

  In the same way that other kids spied on adult dinner parties, Rahm and I would hang on the edges of these political planning sessions, watching, listening, and learning. When these gatherings took place in our living room, which most did, we would crawl behind the crescent-shaped part of the sectional sofa that occupied a corner of the room and hide under the triangle-shaped table that filled the empty space between the arc of the upholstery and the plaster walls. There was enough room for two of us, although a few legs and elbows might stick out, and if the adults were engaged in the issues and talking loudly they could not hear when we whispered or made the tabletop bump against a wall. Eventually we would forget to be quiet. Once discovered we would be subjected to lots of oohs and aahs and “they’re so cutes” before we were shuffled off to bed.

  At that time, the specifics about policies and tactical discussion went over our heads, but we felt, deep down, the emotions behind what was being said. The main thing was that people were suffering and anyone who cared about right and wrong had an obligation to speak up and demand better. In this crowd, indignation was infectious, and the sight and sound of so many different people speaking so passionately stirred the heart. Here were grown-ups who believed that it was possible to make the world a better place and to achieve it by pointing out the unfairness and the suffering and seeking a solution through dialogue. Undoubtedly this experience of eavesdropping on activists helped instill in us both a moral sensibility and the desire to do something about a problem whenever we could. It is not hard to see Rahm’s devotion to improving Chicago Public Schools and my work on universal health-care coverage as outgrowths of witnessing these meetings in our house.

  Because they often worked on school issues, the CORE people talked a lot about children, but very few kids ever came to these sessions with their parents. The exceptions were the Deans. Roz Dean had been high school friends with my mother’s sister Esther. She had joined CORE along with her husband, Alan, who was black. When meetings were held at our house during the daytime they often brought their sons Michael and Clifton. The two families became close. We spent many Saturdays and Sundays at their home and they often came to see us. Michael and Clifton played with us in the alley behind the house and on the sidewalk out front. I think this must have been where I first heard the phrase “nigger lover” muttered by someone passing by on the sidewalk.

  In this time, from 1961 to 1967, Chicago was one of the hot spots in a national civil rights movement that was gathering strength. The tactics used at protests were expanded to include passive resistance and participants expected to be arrested. Many people received special training—they were taught to make themselves limp and heavy—right in our living room. Afterward we would play at this activity, imitating the adults we saw lying like rag dolls on the floor of our apartment.

  Although we were too young to understand exactly what my mother was doing as she left for a few hours of marching, we noticed that she returned with a lot to discuss. On three or four occasions she stayed away overnight because she had been arrested. These arrests, as I later learned, were usually part of a plan. CORE trained volunteers in the methods of civil disobedience and passive resistance. When the protesters respectfully refused police orders to stop their picketing and move along, the officers had no choice but to charge them with disorderly conduct and take them into custody. As they tried to do this, the protesters would go limp and fall to the ground. By relaxing as much as possible they made their bodies difficult to handle, which turned any effort at mass arrests into a laborious spectacle of teams of police officers hauling people one by one onto paddy wagons and buses.

  Arrests increased the chance that a protest or demonstration would get media attention. They also signaled that the issue at hand, whether it was education, housing, employment, or anything else, was so serious that otherwise law-abiding citizens were willing to go to jail in order to be heard. Although there were few of them, the presence of women, especially white women who could be mothers, added an important touch of dive
rsity to these scenes.

  My mother’s first arrest was in Chicago, and probably occurred around 1963, when people all over the country attended demonstrations to show their support for Martin Luther King Jr. and the campaign for racial equality that blazed across the South. My mother spent one night in a Cook County jail after she was arrested with many other civil rights protesters. A friend helped my dad take care of us while she was gone. Having seen pictures and TV film reports of police using nightsticks and turning dogs and fire hoses on protesters, we were a little anxious, but with enough reassurance we were able to go to sleep and by morning she was back at home.

  On two other occasions, my mother was arrested in Evanston, a wealthy northern suburb that is home to both Northwestern University and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The first time she was dragged in by police who had responded to complaints about pickets disrupting traffic at a real estate company. She was released by a judge who said she would be dealt with more harshly if it happened again. The second time someone reported that she was back at the real estate agency and was the “ringleader” of a protest. Finding herself in serious trouble, my mother called on a family friend who was a lawyer. She expected that Jerry Jaffe, an older man with a quiet legal practice, would help her find a younger attorney who knew his way around the criminal courts. Instead he took up the cause himself. He got my mother released and then told her, “Thanks for reminding me why I became a lawyer in the first place.”

  Although a middle-aged lawyer might have gotten a certain charge out of my mother’s case, she did not take any of these incidents lightly. Jail is jail, even if you know you won’t be there for very long, and she worried about us at home. Indeed, we were so accustomed to her attention and our nighttime routine that we were always upset by her absence. And though my father supported her unequivocally, there were times when our grandfather Herman thought she was risking too much. He knew the tough-minded people who were standing against integration in places like the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. They had shown him their willingness to fight during union battles in the 1930s and ’40s. Herman had no doubt that they could turn violent if they felt provoked. He was afraid that my mother would find herself in the wrong place at a moment when shouts were answered by rocks, fists, and baseball bats.

  Years before, when she had been more or less forced to give up her own shot at an education, my mother had been a girl unable to speak on her own behalf. Now she was a woman who saw that the political system was bullying powerless children in a similar way and she had discovered she could do something about it. Having found her voice, both in the civil rights movement and as an adult with her own family, my mother stood up to Herman. She told him she knew how to take care of herself and would continue her activism. The lessons she taught us through her courage and assertiveness were as important as any other form of mothering. They also showed us that people can evolve and grow and that women can be full and multifaceted human beings, not just nonstop caregivers. In these ways marching and shouting and getting arrested were a way for our mother to express who she was.

  The subtext of my mother’s civil rights work, especially the bit about women as fully engaged human beings, was not something Herman would have grasped in a conscious way. I don’t think that even my mother understood, at that time, all the factors that drove her to fight for kids and families who were being oppressed. But she made it very clear that she was not going to stop attending the protests or welcoming the neighborhood chapter of CORE to our home.

  Herman’s worst fear—that my mother would be harmed during a protest—was never realized, but his daughter was occasionally manhandled by white police officers who resented having to move limp and heavy protesters who lay on the sidewalks practicing passive resistance. They could not understand why this woman, who looked like their wives, was mixed up in racial politics. “Lady, what are you doing here?” they would ask. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she would reply before challenging them with the charge that they were disrupting a perfectly legal protest.

  Under my mother’s influence, I became the kind of kid who evaluated everything he saw and heard and did not assume that anyone’s word was final just because he or she wore a uniform, a badge, or a doctor’s white coat. It was my right, perhaps even my obligation, to determine if people were being fair and not just accept their authority. Of course, a small child’s world, especially one in which adults are loving and patient, is just and fair in a way that the real world can never match. Growing up is often a matter of confronting this reality, and adjusting to it. As a young child I was truly disturbed, for example, when I realized that many people in America and around the world lived with hunger and without basic shelter or medical care. However, I was relieved to know my parents were doing what they could to help solve these problems. Then came the Passover afternoon when we got in the Rambler to drive to my grandparents’ house for a Seder.

  We had driven just a few blocks when I said, “Daddy, how do you make money?”

  “When babies get sick, I take care of them.”

  “You mean you take money for making babies well?”

  “Well, I don’t take much, Jonny. And I have to take care of our family, you know.”

  He was right, of course, but I was outraged by the thought that my father required payment for his services as a doctor. For the rest of the ride I sputtered questions about parents who were poor and could not pay and demanded to know why everyone could not just get medical care for free. All he could do was explain that he did help many people for free, but that doctors had to care for their families, too, and that meant that someone had to pay.

  When we got to my grandparents’ home I ran upstairs to tell the Big Bangah how terrible it was that my father was taking money from the sick. He declared, “My daughter is raising a socialist.”

  No doubt our neighbors would have taken Herman’s statement as a fact, not a joke. In their eyes we were radical. And while the landlord insisted the reason was all the noise we made on the ceiling of the first-floor apartment with our running around, there probably was something more to his refusal to renew the lease on our apartment on Buena Avenue. He did not like the big, mixed-race meetings my mother was having in our apartment. Those sessions were no bigger or more troublesome than a typical dinner party or cocktail hour, but the neighbors who hissed “nigger lovers” at us on the sidewalks found them intolerable. And I’m sure they let their discomfort be known to the landlord.

  In mid-1963 a moving van pulled up to our building on West Buena Avenue and our furniture and other belongings were loaded up for a two-mile journey north to a quiet block on Winona Street, on the northern edge of the neighborhood called Uptown. The four-bedroom apartment my father found for us took up the entire first floor of a building, so there were no downstairs neighbors to be bothered by our pounding footsteps.

  With nine rooms, the place on Winona was as big as many suburban houses and came with high ceilings and heavy moldings. Even better, for us boys, was the location. It was half a block from the park along the lakeshore and two blocks from the beautiful sandy beach at Foster Avenue.

  My parents made some definitive statements with the way they divided up the space. First, they made sure that a small room that faced the street was reserved for my father as a study where he could read, listen to music, and do paperwork. After taking the biggest bedroom for themselves they moved my grandmother into a small bedroom/bathroom suite off the kitchen, which had presumably been designed for a maid. We three boys were crowded into a single bedroom, with an attached half bath. Rahm and Ari slept on bunks. I had a single bed. The fourth bedroom was set aside as “the children’s study.”

  Equipped with three desks, each with a lamp and chair, and a shared bookcase, the study room was where we were expected to do our homework and any other extra projects we might choose to do. No one talked about this being an unusual arrangement, but my guess is that in 1963 very few families
would have devoted an entire room to the academic pursuits of three boys under the age of six. My parents did it, and their choice signaled the value of study, work, and achievement. In time they would reinforce the importance of academic excellence by carefully reviewing our schoolwork and consistently emphasizing the value of getting good grades, which would eventually help us enter top colleges.

  It was around this time that my parents also began talking about how I ought to become a doctor when I grew up. I was the firstborn child of an immigrant who himself was a doctor. Plus I was a goody-goody and got good grades in all my school subjects, and I especially liked science, where I could literally poke and probe nature. Thus, because of my brains and curiosity and our immigrant status, it seemed almost predetermined that I should be a doctor. That I was going in the medical direction relieved Rahm and Ari of any career pressure. In this Jewish family, one doctor son would be both necessary and sufficient. I always thought those two owed me big-time for giving them this freedom of choice.

  Outside our apartment, the neighborhood was full of families from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. In this way, Uptown was like countless neighborhoods in postwar America where families of varying backgrounds found shelter for a time as they climbed the economic ladder. Shared aspirations for middle-class comfort, safety, and status meant that we all had much in common. However, there was no denying that our differences bred prejudice and often led to conflicts, especially with kids who recently arrived from Appalachia. These boys and girls had definite feelings about “kikes” and “nigger lovers” and were aggressive about expressing them.