Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family Page 9

  In those days most people, including physicians who were patients, followed a doctor’s orders. My father considered his injury and the odds of a good recovery and agreed to let them operate. At this point my mother, who never accepted authority, put her foot down. She understood that the doctors in Pontiac were general practitioners, not orthopedists or hand surgeons. She did not think they had the experience to know for certain that the hand could not be saved. She asked them if my father could make it to Chicago safely.

  None of the doctors, including her husband, thought this was a great idea; there was still blood accumulating in the hand and my father was in tremendous pain. But because my mother could be an overwhelming force when her mind was made up, they reluctantly agreed that with a tight bandage and enough painkillers he might reach Chicago without suffering irreversible injury. When Shirley and Ernie arrived, they piled blankets and pillows on the floor of their car and helped my father to lie down there; we all crowded in around him.

  With the painkillers gradually wearing off, the drive from Pontiac to Chicago may have been the longest three hours of my father’s life. When they got to the city Ernie drove directly to Mount Sinai Hospital, where two top surgeons, the Miller brothers, examined him. These doctors agreed that there was no surgery that could be done to make an effective repair. But they did not think amputation was necessary, either. They believed if the swelling could be controlled, his hand might heal on its own. They could not assure my parents that it would recover completely. In fact, the odds were against it. But with the right care in the short term and a commitment to physical therapy over the long term, my father might get most of his normal functioning back.

  The initial treatment regime would require my father to keep his hand immobilized, and to plunge it into hot paraffin wax several times per day. The wax baths, which were intended to stimulate blood flow and healing, were quite painful. They were also effective—or an amazing placebo. Within a few weeks, my father had healed enough to begin an aggressive physical therapy routine that consisted mostly of squeezing rubber balls over and over again. Determined, he stuck to the routine religiously. He would never get full use of his hand. Today, he still cannot make his left thumb and pinky finger come together. However, the treatment was enough to make his hand almost normal. He could use it for writing, with the same old terrible penmanship, and for conducting physical exams. For us Emanuel boys, watching him work through a serious and painful injury with such gritty determination gave us one more lesson in how to approach life.

  By late summer, my father and mother were back to their routines. He went to work every day and took his turn being “on call” every other night and weekend. She prepared to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was being organized by James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., and A. Philip Randolph, head of the sleeping car porters union. In the weeks leading up to the march, the backlash against civil rights protesters had grown more violent. The Big Bangah tried to talk my mother out of going to Washington but she held firm, again denying his claim to authority and asserting herself as an adult.

  On August 28, 1963, my mother was one of 250,000 Americans who gathered in front of the Washington Monument and then marched to the Lincoln Memorial, where they listened to performances by Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, and others and heard a series of addresses capped by Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” address. The speech, broadcast live on television, would soon be hailed as the moment when the modern civil rights movement cohered into an unstoppable historical force. She came home filled with energy and stayed up late into the night talking with my father about what she had seen and heard. I was so young that I could not possibly understand all the reasons for her excitement. Nor could I fully grasp the historical significance of the events she had joined. What I would recall mainly was that what Dr. King had done had brought true happiness to our home.

  Five

  INTO THE WORLD

  “And Jonathan, what’s your father’s name?”

  Mrs. Lazan, my first-grade teacher, was checking her records. After confirming my new address she had noticed that my father’s first name was missing from her book. She asked me what it was and then I said, “Benjamin.”

  “Can you spell that for me?”

  I may have written a hundred notes and dedicated a thousand crayon drawings to “Daddy” but I had never addressed anything to Benjamin Emanuel.

  I began, saying, “B-E-N,” but then stopped and murmured, with some embarrassment, “I don’t know the rest.”

  After all, it wasn’t my name and I had no reason to know how to spell it. It was probably my first encounter with public failure in the classroom and I did not like it at all. My face flushed red and hot and I could not sit down fast enough. I would always remember the experience and it made me even more determined to avoid getting tripped up on facts I should know.

  My parents chose Anshe Emet school—the words mean “people of truth”—mainly because it provided an hour and a half of Hebrew lessons to every child each day. They thought that when we moved back to Israel, knowing Hebrew would be essential. When Rahm and I moved back to Chicago in the late 1990s, we both ended up sending our children to the same school. Walking my children through the school for the very first time, I couldn’t help notice that the rooms looked pretty much the same, and to the annoyance and embarrassment of my girls, I insisted on pointing out which room housed each of my classes, and reminiscing about my classmates and some of our shenanigans. I also noticed that while the school still seemed small and very communal—the principal still knew the name and family of every student—there were now sixty children in three classes per grade whereas we had just one class with the same peers year in and year out. And the sociodemographics and politics of the families had changed. When we boys were at Anshe Emet, the families were very middle-class. While there were a few rich families, our family was the norm. No one ever was teased for wearing Sears jeans or hand-me-down coats; we didn’t know that designer clothes existed. When my daughters were enrolled, despite being a two-doctor family, we found ourselves at the lower end of the income distribution. With children of much wealthier stockbrokers and commodity traders, the feel of the school changed to be more entitled and snobby, and there were even a few Republicans, which would have been unheard-of when we walked the halls in the 1960s.

  The school was affiliated with Anshe Emet Synagogue. The temple was Chicago’s largest conservative congregation, but it was best known for a public forum series that had been started in the late 1920s by a famous rabbi named Solomon Goldman. The forum attracted an astonishing lineup of speakers—including Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg, and Clarence Darrow—who addressed big issues like war and peace and social justice.

  Jewish regard for education is so widely recognized that it is hard to discuss without lapsing into caricature. But what many people miss when they consider the Jewish commitment to scholarship is that education is a pathway both to material success and to a happy, fulfilled life that includes giving back to the community—one version of the American dream.

  For the kids at Anshe Emet Day School in the 1960s, preparation for the good life in America took place in relatively small classes—nineteen to twenty-two kids each—where it was easy for teachers to foster a family-like atmosphere. We got lots of individual attention and heavy doses of art, music, and theater. Every year the fifth grade put on Macbeth under the direction of principal Morton Reisman, who knew nothing about stage direction but adored Shakespeare and put on a hell of a show. His enthusiasm was shared by most of the staff, including one of our Hebrew teachers, Mrs. Dubavick. A sturdy, middle-aged woman with a serious demeanor and heavy Eastern European accent, Mrs. Dubavick had a huge, bulbous nose and piercing eyes. Between classes she would sit by the open window in her classroom, smoking the European cigarettes that had turned her fingers yellow and made her voice gravelly and dramatic.

  “This year we’re going to read Exodus in Hebrew,
” she announced in September to my fourth-grade class. “I want you to understand there is violence in it. There’s blood and guts and some sex. If there’s anyone here who cannot handle it, I want to know now.”

  Of course we could handle it. In fact, the warning guaranteed she would receive our rapt attention for every lesson. The Hebrew we learned at the small school was rather formal, the type you would use to read religious texts, and not the fast, slangy language you hear on the streets of Tel Aviv. This would not matter to most students, who would never visit Israel, let alone live there. In fact, mastery of the spoken language was probably not the main point of the class anyway. In Mrs. Dubavick’s lessons, and our religious studies, we discovered a shared ancient heritage that made us feel proud, secure, and part of something bigger than ourselves.

  In the rest of our studies, we were held to high standards for both performance and effort. In fifth-grade math, for example, our teacher, Miss Hacker, required that all students score 100 percent on a weekly multiplication test before the class could stop taking them. Every week she called out twenty problems; we worked over them in silence and then handed our answer sheets to our designated partners across the aisle. Mine was Joanne Finkelstein. Over the weeks, we all became invested in the perfect class score, and chastised the student or students who missed one question. When we all scored perfects in March, we screamed for joy.

  This multiplication exercise was typical of the way our teachers fostered both competition and group cohesion. The school was so small that as the one classroom full of kids moved together through the years, we came to feel almost as close as family members. In addition to the strict academic program, Anshe Emet gave us a community that supported achievement. Almost every child came from a family that put a high value on education. Most Anshe Emet kids were also second- or third-generation Americans. For them, the story of immigration and struggling for acceptance was a fading memory. Their parents had high expectations for their offspring. We, in turn, pushed one another, and just as athletes improve as they play against tougher opponents, we got better.

  The competition was especially good for a kid like me. Inside our family, I was the undisputed academic champ. One of my advantages was temperament. I was slightly less hyperactive and better at studying than my brothers. I also benefited from my status as firstborn. As the eldest, I was always ahead of my brothers in reading, vocabulary, and conversation and was welcomed into adult-style interactions with my parents and their friends. But though I was a pretty smart boy at home, I was, fortunately, not the smartest kid in my class at school. That title, for as long as I attended Anshe Emet, belonged to a scrawny kid with reddish brown hair whose name was Spencer Waller.

  Spencer Waller was a lot like me. My father was a doctor. His was a dentist. We both talked too much. Like me, Spencer had scuffled with the kids from Appalachia whom he met on the streets and in the parks, and like me he had been taunted with anti-Semitic slurs. Indeed, we were so much alike that in first grade I just had to stick out my foot and trip him when he was hurrying past me. Spencer fell on his face and bit his tongue so hard that he was rushed to a doctor for stitches. Considering my own accident with the radiator and the sucker, and Rahm’s almost-severed fingers, Spencer’s injury made me think, for a moment, that I might be a dangerous kid to hang around with.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t often so aggressive or hostile at school. For the most part I was an eager, albeit loud and occasionally obnoxious, kid who was desperate to seize the top spot in my class, a goal that Spencer Waller always denied me. Week after week (and eventually year after year), Spencer would score just a point or two higher than me on most tests, quizzes, and homework assignments. I would try to make up ground with higher scores on homework and special projects, but here again he usually prevailed. A good example of this competition was the special Greek history assignment we were given in fourth grade. I put in extra effort, and handed in a report on the story of the Trojan War, complete with a model of the famous wooden horse. I was sure my project would get an A. It did. But Spencer’s project got an A-plus.

  I became obsessed with beating Spencer Waller—indeed, for better or worse, part of me still is to this day—and this became a topic of regular conversation in our home. My father had dealt with his own academic nemesis in medical school and knew what it was like to finish second in his med school class. But though my parents sympathized, they never said or did anything to try to placate my hunger to overcome my rivals. In their view, you must work hard, tirelessly, using all the gifts God gave you, in order to succeed. Big achievements might be noted and celebrated in some modest way, but by the next morning life went back to normal and you were supposed to train your sights on the next goal. If we had a problem with the way things were handled we could ask for a family meeting—sometimes these were called powwows—and say whatever was on our minds.

  Under the rules of the powwow, which usually took place around the kitchen table, no topic was off-limits. Sometimes these discussions got quite raucous, and as my brothers and I got older, the vocabulary permitted around the table—and in our regular interactions—became more colorful. Yiddish, formal English, and cursing were all mixed up. In one burst of conversation you might be called a meshugenah, a moron, and an ass, all in rapid succession.

  There was nothing personal in these words. It was the family style to include a little insult—“You’re an idiot and here’s why”—with whatever point you wanted to make. Also, you were expected to talk loud, and fast, and if you waited politely for your turn to speak you were lost. Our kitchen was a crowded deli at lunchtime, not a tearoom at 4 P.M.

  My mother liked these powwows because they gave her a chance to see inside our hearts and minds. If we used a family meeting to complain about her, it was generally because we were upset over those moments when she ran out of patience and abandoned us both physically and emotionally. She would throw up her hands and say something like “I hate all of you equally,” then retreat to the bathroom, which was the one place where she could find peace behind a locked door, flipping through a book or magazine and smoking a cigarette or two. For our sake I would pray that Rahm hadn’t made pinholes in her cigarettes, which was something he did every once in a while to protest her smoking.

  Depending on the severity of the episode our mother would either emerge from the bathroom and life would return to normal, or she would freeze us out emotionally for hours or even days. The worst inevitably came on Mother’s Day, or her birthday. What she wanted was one day of special treatment—a nice breakfast, a thoughtful gift, and relief from her usual homemaking obligations. We usually failed to deliver.

  It wasn’t that our mother made a mystery out of what pleased her. We all knew that she liked flowers and hoped for gifts that showed someone had considered her as an individual and not some generic “mother” or “wife.” However, our dad hated giving flowers; they were so ephemeral, dying after a day or two, and therefore wasteful. And he never had the insight for meaningful gift giving. Most of the time he didn’t buy one. If he did, it would be some impersonal household item, or a utilitarian sweater. Without a great role model, we boys tried, but invariably fell short. We didn’t have lots of money and couldn’t coax him to cooperate. Also, we were not terribly good at planning either. The Big Day would arrive and we would have to scramble. Disappointed and angry, our mother would cry, “You don’t care! I work hard all year long and it means nothing to you!”

  Sometimes the screaming could go on for hours. Other times she would go silent—which was even worse. For kids who were accustomed to a generous amount of attention and a loud house, this freezing silence was excruciating. We all felt the loss of conversation, affection, and energy in a way that grew more painful as time passed. Indeed, whenever the freeze lasted more than a day the family fell into a sort of situational depression, marked by anxiety and the fear that things might never get back to normal.

  We responded by gathering on Rahm’s bed, the bottom b
unk, to whisper ideas about how to get back into our mom’s good graces.

  “We should make dinner tonight.”

  “What can we make? Maybe we should ask Dad to take the family out.”

  “Dad, take us out? No way. Plus it would be one of those silent dinners. With Mom still angry and not allowing anyone to say anything.”

  “What’s your big idea?”

  “I don’t have one. You know we just have to wait.”

  “Let’s clean up the family room and make sure not to fight tonight.”

  Over the years we tried various approaches. Cleaning the house. Straightening our room. Cooking Sunday breakfast of lox, bagels, and eggs. In all cases, we offered an abject apology and dish-cleaning service usually performed by Rahm. At the next family powwow someone, usually brave Ari, would remind my mother of how upsetting these episodes were and complain that they lasted way too long. To her credit, my mother would explain why she did what she did. But though our mother eagerly sought our opinions and seemed to enjoy hearing what was on our minds, she did not always give us what we asked for, emotionally.

  Perhaps because he sensed better than us the limits of conversation, our father was not terribly enthusiastic about these family meetings. If things went on too long, or we pressed a point too hard, he would flee the kitchen for a book or the television, leaving my mother to handle things by herself. At other times he would use his status as the father to assert his authority in a way that violated the Emanuel philosophy. During one of these moments I complained loudly.

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Who told you it was a democracy?” answered my father.

  “Well then what is it?”

  “A theocracy.”

  “So you’re God?” I shot back.

  Across the table I could see Ari’s face light up. He got the shovav look.