Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Read online

  We did find friends in the building next door, however. Georgie, the Italian-American kid who was involved in Rahm’s finger-smashing incident, introduced me to the rituals of the Catholic Church as he practiced during the week for being an altar boy on Sundays. I let Georgie put me down on my knees, hands folded in prayer, while he uttered some Latin prayer or other. I had no idea what was going on. In our building, the other tenants included a Greek-American family and a couple named Downs, with sons named Sean and Tommy and a daughter named Ana Maria. Mr. Downs, whose first name was John, was an “artist/reporter” for The Chicago Daily News. Seven years younger than my father, he was reflexively conservative and rarely questioned authority. His mind began to change as he got to know my parents and heard about the issues discussed at the organizing meetings at our apartment. But he never joined them. He preferred, instead, to observe and report for the newspaper and, when off duty, to enjoy our family’s friendship.

  John Downs was a real, all-American dad in a way my father never was. He grew up on a Wisconsin farm. He drove a sporty white Thunderbird with red leather seats, played baseball with us, and put up a basketball hoop on the garage in the alley. On any given Saturday he might announce that he was headed for “the country” and invite anyone so inclined to come along for the adventure. Rahm, Ari, and I were always game. Often we would wind up at some farm outside the city where John simply pulled his car up to a barn, honked the horn, and asked if we could have a look around. Invariably the proud farmer would take us on a tour and we’d get to see lots of cows, pigs, and perhaps a few horses. Exotic sights to us city slickers.

  One summer, John enlisted us in the design and construction of a wooden go-cart from scrap lumber and a set of wheels stripped from an old grocery cart. He then had the brilliant idea to challenge the kids in the building next door to build a similar contraption so we could race in the cobblestone back alley. We made up pairs of pushers and drivers and clattered up and down the brick alley for hours. On other occasions, the alley was the site for kickball or Wiffle Ball games. When John returned from trips to see his wife’s family in Texas, he demonstrated the fine art of setting off M-80 firecrackers. Our father, who was more cerebral and not handy with tools, and, quite frankly, too busy for hanging out in the alley, would never have done any of these things. But to their credit, my parents never discouraged us from hanging out with other adults, learning from everyone we met.

  Thanks to neighbors like John Downs and the large number of kids being raised in nearby apartments, our little stretch of Winona was a busy and happy place. We would think nothing of running down the block and pounding on a door to find out if a friend was up for a visit or a game. When Downs’s daughter was born, Rahm, who loved babies, would show up unexpectedly and report, “I’m here to feed Ana Maria.” Apparently Mrs. Downs had once told him, “Of course you can feed her sometime,” and Rahm held her to the promise, many times over.

  Although people tend to idealize the past—everyone was friendly, every neighborhood was perfectly safe—I know that the few blocks around our apartment were an oasis of safety and kindness. Eddie wasn’t just the manager of the drugstore. He was someone who looked out for us when we passed by his shop and let us stop inside to dry off when we got caught in the rain. However, even in a safe neighborhood the city posed a few dangers. In the early 1960s robberies and muggings occurred regularly in Lincoln Park. More danger waited three or four blocks to the west, in areas where gangs were starting to take control of certain street corners. Then there were the anti-Semites, who seem to exist in almost every place and time. Ari, Rahm, and I experienced our first brush with this problem when I was in third grade. Eight or nine of us were playing in the alley behind our apartment when one of the boys called Rahm a kike.

  My “Take it back!” was answered by the oldest kid in the group, who happened to be a girl. “Don’t you dare take it back,” she ordered. When the offender stood firm, with his chin thrust out, I took a swing at him. He swung back and in an instant we were punching, scratching, and wrestling with each other.

  Rahm and Ari were six and four at the time so they just stood on the sidelines yelling as the other boy and I threw punches and wrestled on the ground. Neither of us did much damage, but doing damage was not the point. The point was that we had been insulted and bullied and we would not stand for it. There would be more fights in the future, and Rahm and Ari eventually battled at my side. After each fight, we would walk home talking heatedly about who won and who lost and how they were wrong for starting the fight in the first place. My mother and father were not alarmed when we got into these scrapes. I think they understood how they happened and knew that as long as we were small and the injuries were minor, it was good that we stood up for ourselves.

  It would be hard to say that the kids we fought with in the alley had a real understanding of the bigotry they showed. These fights were mostly based on the idea that we were somehow supposed to hate each other because we were different. We were different in some obvious ways. We came from different religious backgrounds. The other kids also noticed that we seemed to get a lot of breaks from school that they did not get. This was especially true early in the school year when our Jewish day school closed for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. Considering their own struggles to get back into the discipline of academics after summer vacation, our Jews-only holidays made us seem unfairly privileged.

  Also, I have no doubt that some of the resentment that was focused on us rose out of insecurity and fear. Many of the newcomers to the neighborhood came from Appalachia seeking jobs and fleeing rural poverty. In Chicago life for them was strange, uncomfortable, and filled with rejection. Scorned by people who called them hillbillies, the kids who cursed at us were scared and lonely and angry and we were convenient targets for their built-up rage. As the sons of a foreign-born doctor who lived in a big apartment, we probably represented everything that seemed unfair and out of reach.

  What the kids from Appalachia failed to understand was that we were outsiders, too. In the 1960s Jews in America were a distinct minority subject to plenty of discrimination. Sometimes the effects were direct. For example, my father was not given privileges at certain hospitals, like Northwestern. In other cases you just knew that parts of society were unfriendly. Many of Chicago’s private clubs were closed to Jews in the 1960s and Jews were still excluded from certain suburbs.

  To my parents’ credit, we did not spend any time worrying about where we might be excluded. Instead, we considered ourselves full citizens and believed we had the responsibility to fight for all the cherished rights this status confers. We also assumed that the country we loved belonged to us just as surely as it belonged to the descendants of the Mayflower families. Perhaps the only difference was that my father possessed a “recent immigrant’s” sense of wonder and excitement about discovering opportunities for earning one’s way to unheard-of wealth and security. It was in this spirit that we began a series of long-distance driving vacations that allowed us to see the breadth of both the American landscape and its culture.

  For our first big road trip, my father rented a small camper, the hard-shell kind that you pull behind your car, and loaded up our blue Rambler station wagon with blankets and food and drinks. The whole family, including Savta, piled in and he pointed us toward U.S. Route 66. In the city that we left behind, civil rights leaders were planning for a mass rally at Grant Park, where, in a few days, Mayor Richard Daley would be booed off the stage by ten thousand angry citizens. Another speaker would be drowned out by voices in the crowd, including some that cried, “Kill him!”

  As Chicago simmered, we Emanuels spent two weeks traveling to Colorado for a vacation. We traveled in classic American family road trip fashion, with a few variations based on my father’s priorities. He always preferred adventure over creature comforts, which meant, for example, that we tried to avoid restaurants. Since my brothers and I could eat, literally, a dozen or more sandwiches per day, this mea
nt that our mother got no vacation from her duty as quartermaster and cook.

  The seating arrangements inside the sky-blue Rambler typically found my father behind the wheel while my mother sat in the backseat, where she could tend to Ari and Rahm, who were both in car seats. These were rare at the time, but because my mother was a stickler for car safety we used them religiously. Savta sat in the front passenger seat by the window and I squeezed between her and my father with an American Automobile Association planner called a “TripTik” in my hands. These little booklets contained maps with yellow highlighted routes that could guide you through an entire road trip. I loved being the navigator who kept track of the passing landmarks and was authorized to raise my voice above the din of conversation to bark an order to “turn right!” or declare, “We’re going the wrong way!” My role as navigator was a source of envy for Rahm and if he pestered my parents enough they would tell me to let him handle the TripTik for a while. During one of these moments he screamed, “Stop!” When my father testily asked why he should stop, Rahm noted that the road we were traveling was gray-black and the route on the map was colored yellow. “Dad needs to find the yellow road!” My father was not pleased, to say the least.

  As anyone who has taken a long family car trip knows, our adventures were also mixed with other kinds of stress and occasional mishaps. Besides being responsible for our care and feeding, our mother, who also had to keep her eye on a not-so-cheerful mother-in-law, inevitably suffered a meltdown or two per trip. And the first one frequently occurred at the start, just so everyone knew who would be dictating the emotional tenor of the trip. My father never saw the reason to spend a lot on hotels or motels. “You just lay your head down and leave the next morning. Why do we need a fancy room?” he would always say. Typically, very few of the motel rooms he selected were ever up to our mother’s higher but not very stringent standards. The same was frequently true for restaurants. Whenever she was unhappy she would start complaining about something and end up delivering an endless monologue of criticism. Observations on the mildew in a motel shower, the chilly air in the camper, or the ugliness of the campground would be followed by more generalized complaints about how we were inconsiderate and unkind and ungrateful.

  In the early days, my father would catch much of the heat because he botched the plans for the trip, ignored her advice, or failed to be helpful in some way. When Ari, Rahm, and I were the focus of these rants it was because we were too loud or fighting too much. I know now that these outbursts came from a woman being pushed beyond her capacity. She never liked camping, and considering that she had to take care of us, these adventures hardly amounted to a vacation for her.

  At the time, however, we boys were usually shocked by our mother’s emotional storms, which arose suddenly and were followed by a stunned silence that could last a hundred miles or more. Sometimes we would pray for a little mishap to break the tension. Not infrequently, we got one.

  On the 1963 expedition we hit just about every tourist attraction you can name between Chicago and the foot of the Rockies without major incident. As we approached the mountains, my father directed our attention out the window and reminded us to appreciate the view, which included massive stands of Douglas fir and blue spruce climbing up the mountainsides and, in the distance, snowcapped peaks. Simultaneously, my safety-conscious mother told him to forget about the view and keep his eyes on the road.

  The gawking was easy on the gentler slope of the foothills. When we reached steeper inclines and the two-lane highway became a series of switchbacks, my father had to focus more intently on the challenge of keeping the car and trailer moving forward. Signs that warned KEEP IN LOW GEAR were new to him. He did not understand that he was supposed to slip the handle of the automatic transmission out of drive and into the slot marked “L” to prevent a stall. As the incline got steeper and the sheer drop beside the road grew more terrifying, the car shuddered and stalled. He slammed on the brakes to keep us from sliding backward.

  “Get out and put some rocks behind the wheels!” he screamed with panic in his voice.

  My mother and I scrambled out of the car and searched for the biggest rocks we could find. These chocks stopped the slip-sliding car and gave my father a chance to calm down. They did nothing, of course, for the long line of vehicles that quickly collected behind us, with drivers honking their horns and revving their engines. My father restarted the car and struggled to get the car to move forward. Shudder, stall. Shudder, stall. Finally one kind fellow traveler got out of his car and walked up to tell my father that despite the fact that the transmission was automatic, he needed to use the low gear to climb the mountain. With that reassurance, my father restarted the Rambler, put it in “L,” and eased off the brake, and we crept forward.

  During our time in the Rockies we camped, poked around little cowboy and mining museums, and visited tourist traps. We bought cowboy hats and rode horses and got our pictures taken with mountains rising in the distance. Our home base, the trailer, was moved from campground to campground. We fished, hiked in the forests, and swam in isolated lakes. Much of this was done while dodging rain showers, but we had so much fun we did not care. During the evenings, Rahm, Ari, and I would take “sink” baths near our camper and run around the campsite naked screaming at one another. At night we bundled up in blankets on the makeshift beds in the little trailer.

  When we started the return trip home the temperature gauge on the Rambler dashboard began moving upward. My father stopped to fill the radiator with water, but this fix didn’t last long. With the needle rising again he pulled into a gas station and popped the hood. An attendant found a tiny hole in the radiator, where steam was escaping, and recommended a new radiator. The only alternative, he said, would be to plug the hole with something like chewing gum and pray for it to hold. Ever the cheapskate, my father purchased a few packs of gum.

  For three kids who were used to being denied access to gum and every other bad-for-you confection, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. We packed our mouths with Juicy Fruit and Doublemint, and, just when the sugar was depleted, announced we had some more ready for the radiator. He pulled over to the shoulder and we spit our nice juicy wad into our father’s hands. He popped the hood and pressed the mass against the hole and we drove off. The repair lasted about twenty minutes until it fell off, and when the needle began to move again my father pulled over, took more well-masticated gum from our mouths, and made another plug. That lasted a few hours. Finally, we reached the next real town, where he found a local mechanic who had access to a used but intact radiator, which he swapped for our bad one. The next morning we were on the road again.

  On the last day of the trip we had just passed through the center of an Illinois farm town called Pontiac, which is about 150 miles southwest of Chicago, when the sky darkened and the wind began to howl. The cars and trucks on Route 66 slowed to a crawl. Suddenly the wind gained even more force and a funnel cloud that had formed just to the west touched down behind us.

  Stuck in the line of slow-moving traffic, there was nothing my father could do as the tornado roared down the highway, blackening the sky. From his seat, where the rearview mirrors gave him a full view of the approaching storm, the feelings of helplessness as well as fear must have been hard to endure. With telltale shrieking panic in his voice he ordered my mother to make sure that Rahm and Ari were buckled tightly in their car seats and told us all to hold on tight.

  When it finally arrived, the twister slammed into the trailer and our car with the force of 100 mph winds. With a shudder and then a sudden lurch we careened to the left and then were tipped over and over onto the grassy median. The car blankets, pillows, maps, toys, and sandwiches flew everywhere. I found myself pressed against the rear driver’s-side door of the car, unhurt but shocked by what had happened.

  For a moment, the sound of the tornado made it impossible to hear anything. But then, just as suddenly, the wind died and silence fell over us. As the black cloud turned
to gray I could hear my brothers crying and my mother asking if we were all right. She struggled to help us and my grandmother, who was suspended in midair by her seat belt.

  With my mother’s help we all crawled up and out of the windows on the passenger side of the car. On the highway, we saw other drivers who had gotten out of their cars and trucks come rushing to see what they might do to help. It was then that we realized that my father was still in the car.

  Having seen the tornado bearing down on us, my father had focused on trying to keep the wheels of the car pointed down the highway. He hadn’t rolled up his window and somehow, when the car tipped on its side, his left hand got trapped between the door frame and the ground. Although he was in excruciating pain, he was able to explain why he was stuck and in a few minutes a group of men, mostly truck drivers, organized to free him. First they managed to detach the trailer from the car. Next they actually lifted the car off my father’s hand, righted it, and helped him out of the driver’s seat. By the time they accomplished this, police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance had arrived. The ambulance brought my father to a local community hospital.

  That night, while my mother’s older sister Shirley and her husband, Ernie, raced south to get us, the doctors in Pontiac studied X-rays of my father’s hand and, noting that every bone was crushed and he was losing a lot of blood, recommended amputation. This was a horrific idea. First of all, my father is a lefty; this was his dominant hand, the one he used for writing and every other task that required both strength and fine motor skills. Second, he was a doctor who used his hands every day to conduct examinations, offer reassurance, and play with his young patients.