Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (12 page)

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.

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.

“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.