Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (2 page)

More than a half hour would pass before my father arrived at the hospital, which was on the South Side of the city. His research group, led by a famous Harvard-trained autocrat named Dr. Jack Metcoff,
had begun by testing Chicago’s first kidney dialysis machine on dogs. At the start of 1960 they moved to clinical trials using human beings. The demand for treatment, including emergency cases of attempted suicides by poisoning, was so great that the fellows worked around the clock. On any given day, my father wasn’t likely to return from work before I was asleep for the night. I saw that a man’s work was important, that he must pursue it tirelessly, and that it might require certain sacrifices, like being away from the warmth and comfort of home.

Of course I had mixed feelings about Rahm’s arrival. But as Rahm grew stronger, crawled, and then toddled after me, I enjoyed him more and more. He wasn’t as much fun as a puppy (we’d get one of those later) but he was just as physically expressive. When he was upset, his brow would become furrowed and his whole face seemed to darken. When he smiled, the corners of his mouth turned up sharply, his eyes sparkled, and a dimple would form on his cheek. It was a charming but also mischievous look, the kind that lets you in on a secret joke. The Hebrew word for a kid with this look is
shovav
, which means “little devil,” and Rahm
was
a shovav. His tendency to show his feelings would stay with him for life and evolve to the point where he could communicate a whole range of emotions—puzzled, content, annoyed, you name it—without saying a word. In many staff meetings at the White House, when he was chief of staff and I was working on health-care reform at the Office of Management and Budget, I would see him turn down the corners of his mouth just a bit to show his displeasure with an idea. Or his brow would tighten when he was about to chastise someone. And he remains one of the great subtle eye rollers, especially when someone else is making an observation about political machinations he finds obtuse. What might come as a shock to most people is that as a baby and through his early childhood, Rahm barely spoke at all. When we were young children, I frequently spoke for us both.

“Rahm, do you want something to eat?” my mother would ask.

“He’s not hungry right now,” I’d reply. He’d just as easily go along if I said, “Yes, he wants two pieces of toast with margarine and lots of jam.”

Rahm was similarly passive when it came to play, choosing to sit back and observe and only participate when invited or encouraged. In part his attitude may have been connected to the fact that I was far more aggressive. I was perfectly happy to talk for him and to think up things for both of us to do, like sitting on the window seat drumming on pots with wooden spoons.

For my parents, however, Rahm’s slowness to talk and relative passivity became a concern. During her pregnancy with him my mother had undergone general anesthesia to have a benign tumor removed from her breast and she worried about how the drugs might have affected him. When he was born he was, at six pounds, eleven ounces, her smallest baby. When he reached age two he seemed unusually quiet to my parents. They took him to a specialist to see if his verbal skills were developing normally. It turned out that there was no developmental delay. He could talk perfectly well. He just seemed perfectly content not to—and leave the talking to me.

It seems to me now that during those quiet early years Rahm learned from and about the world not by physically engaging it the way I did, but instead by carefully observing it from a safe distance. Rahm studied his environment and dissected how people interacted; he asserted himself only when it was necessary. But back then I thought of him as kind of a blob, too slow to keep up with a hyperactive, hyperverbal kid like me. When he finally started using full sentences at the age of three and a half, my mother’s anxiety disappeared. But she made the mistake of once telling him how she had worried over the prenatal effects of the anesthesia. Ever the politician, he latched on to this confession and, when it suited his purpose, would say, “You owe me, Mom.” She’d feel guilty, and he’d get what he wanted.

Rahm stayed small as he grew into adulthood and when we were young his size did make me feel protective, especially when we left the apartment. On any given day, we would take an outing—a walk to the park, maybe a stop at a store—but every once in a while we’d bump the baby carriage down the stairs and take a bus downtown, or perhaps to the South Side. From all appearances my mother was just another homemaker schlepping her kids to a museum or a department
store. Many times we actually went to those kinds of places. But on other occasions we went to the Board of Education building on Clark Street to join picket lines or to South Side schools where black parents lay down in the street to block the delivery of temporary classrooms. Called Willis Wagons, after the superintendent of the city schools, Benjamin Willis, these trailers made it possible for the school system to expand classrooms at black schools, maintaining segregation as Chicago’s black population grew and hundreds of thousands of whites moved to the suburbs. They were both the symbols and the instruments of the city’s racism.

My mother wasn’t, as she says, a “lie-down-in-the-street kind of person.” As a mother, she recalls, “I had to make sure I wasn’t arrested, because I had children to worry about. And, believe it or not, I also had in my mind the idea that I had to get home to make your father dinner.”

My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word
feminism
and in those early years she was focused on racial justice. She later confessed that she felt some twinges of resentment over the sacrifices—setting aside her education, career, and other ambitions—that she made for her family, but her protests were on behalf of others. At neighborhood schools, she stood with black parents who gathered by the hundreds in the street to demand equal access even as white neighbors gathered to jeer. I did not understand the issues, but I knew that something important was happening and that it involved people of many different ages and races who were united in a way that felt good.

After she had put in an hour or so at one of these protests, my mother made sure we caught the Chicago Transit Authority bus home in time for her to make dinner and get us kids into bed. More than once we would return home with the same bus driver who had dropped us off. He’d greet my mother with some benign remark—“Had a nice time shopping?”—and she would smile as if that were exactly what she had been doing.

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights. When polled they denied that the country even had a serious racial problem. They believed, instead, that America really did offer equal opportunity, and that discrimination was an unimportant exception and not the rule. At the same time the majority simply knew that a woman’s place was in the home and certainly not on the sidewalk carrying signs and singing freedom songs, and absolutely not with her toddlers in tow. This was, after all, a nation that had waited until 1920 to give women the vote and as of the early 1960s still did not guarantee women equal access to employment and education. Many prestigious universities and colleges, such as Yale and Princeton and my own Amherst College, did not yet admit female students. Women who stood up for themselves and others were routinely criticized as selfish, man-hating battle-axes who certainly must be inadequate wives and neglectful mothers. However, in my family there was nothing strange and everything right about standing up in public for what you believe, especially if justice was at stake. Indeed, standing up was a tradition for us.

Six months before my mother was born, our maternal grandfather had joined the first big American protest against Hitler, a march of fifty thousand that helped unify Chicago’s Jews against the Nazis. Herman Smulevitz understood the way that bigotry can become violent. He was born in Russia in 1902, at a time when mobs of anti-Semites were attacking Jewish communities in murderous pogroms. We were told that he stowed away alone on a ship that brought him to America at the age of ten. After landing in New York he began searching for his father, who had abandoned his mother, remarried, and settled in Indiana. When he finally arrived at his father’s home, exhausted and bewildered by all he had experienced, Herman’s stepmother refused to take him in. He would forever call her the
machashaifeh
, which is Yiddish for “witch.”

Big and strong for his age, and toughened by all he went through, young Herman eventually found refuge with an uncle in the Jewish community around Maxwell Street in Chicago. He worked odd jobs
until he enlisted in the army near the end of World War I, where he saw combat only as a champion boxer. Nearly six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, he had a long reach and huge hands with fingers the size of Polish sausages. This physique, joined with his life experience on the streets of Chicago, made him plenty tough.

After the war, Herman labored as a lumberjack and did track work for a railroad. In 1927 he married a Romanian immigrant named Sophie Lampert. In just six years they had three daughters—Shirley, Esther, and Marsha. A son named Shelden came in 1940, followed by Leslie in 1948. In this time Herman worked as a grocer and a union man who used his muscle, when necessary, to organize steel mills and meatpacking houses. Herman, who taught himself to read English, devoured newspapers and books and held strong opinions about what he read. He was a loud and sometimes profane man who would say almost anything to win an argument.

As a child, Marsha Smulevitz stayed out of the fray, watching her older sisters argue in vain with their father and noticing that her younger brothers were often scolded in a way that seemed to diminish them. She feared her father, resented his bullying, and was devastated when he demanded that she give up the money she had saved for college to pay for her brother Shelden’s college tuition. She complied, but never got over losing her chance to continue her education after high school.

But as much as my mother hated his authoritarian streak, she also listened to what her father said about standing up against injustice. The contradiction inherent in a bully who urges the oppressed to challenge their tormentors was obvious, but it did not make the message any less important. She sought out moments when she might experience the struggle for justice herself. The first chance came on a Thursday afternoon in December 1946. She heard that some whites were organizing to take action against black veterans who planned to move their families into a new public housing project that had been planned as an integrated community. She hopped on her brother’s bike and went to see what might happen.

When my mother arrived at the apartment complex, hundreds of
whites, mostly women who were homemakers, stood in the street to block two black vets who had arrived with moving trucks filled with their belongings. Dozens of police officers were at the site and they helped the drivers inch their trucks through the crowd of angry onlookers. When the trucks stopped, the police officers moved in to protect the men as they tried to unload their stuff. The crowd surged forward. Some of the women screamed threats and racist insults. Others threw rocks and dirt.

Just a thirteen-year-old girl, my mother was shocked to see adult women shrieking with anger, and the police swinging batons to move them. When one of the trucks got stuck in the mud and its wheels began to spin helplessly, the driver switched off the motor and the men inside ran to a nearby office. Rocks rained on them and the vehicle. The truck’s windows were broken and eight people were injured in the melee as more stones flew and the officers pushed the crowd back.

In that moment, my mother promised herself that she would always support anyone who sought equal rights. Back at home she kept what she saw that day to herself because she knew that her father would never approve of a girl taking such a risk. As she became an adult and went out into the world she developed some courage to go with her convictions. By the time I came along she was comfortable arguing with my grandfather even when he banged on the table and shouted. The noise he made when he slapped his big sausage hand down inspired me to call him “Big Banger.” Actually I pronounced it “Big Bang-ah,” but he did not frighten or intimidate me.

Big Bangah got most excited when the subject was elections or party politics. He was a rabidly loyal Democrat, because the Democratic Party represented the workingman. He believed Franklin Roosevelt had literally saved America from the Great Depression and had, in World War II, defeated the most evil entity in history. A true Chicagoan of his generation, Herman believed that whatever policy the Democratic Party pursued, he was for it. If he could have, he would have controlled every vote in his family and delivered them to the Democrats each election day.

My mother was more discerning. She was a liberal and a Democrat,
but she had no patience for politicians of any party who blocked civil rights legislation. She also gave credit to those Republicans—Nelson Rockefeller, Everett Dirksen, and others—who took the right position on civil rights.

Any time my mother praised Dirksen, Rockefeller, or other open-minded, moderate Republicans she got a fierce response from Big Bangah. More than once these arguments developed such intensity that the sound and the fury could make one or both of them come a little unhinged.

One of the most memorable of these battles would arise in the fall of 1966, as Republican Charles “Chuck” Percy challenged the incumbent Democratic senator Paul Douglas. Douglas was my grandfather’s kind of Democrat. He was an intellectual and a political activist who also was a friend of the workingman. He had taught economics at the University of Chicago before entering politics as an anti-machine candidate, in a losing campaign for mayor. A long shot, he had won election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 with a campaign that stressed Truman-style anticommunism as well as civil rights, social programs, and public housing. Since then, he had been a Democratic stalwart, which included supporting John F. Kennedy’s decision to send “advisors” to Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the confrontation with the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese.