Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (25 page)

By the late 1960s there were two New Trier high schools and anyone who looked closely at the way enrollment in these schools was handled could see old-fashioned bigotry at work. The plan to separate Jewish newcomers from the children of old-line New Trier families was developed as the postwar influx of families filled the original New
Trier High to capacity. By the early 1960s plans were set to build a second high school, called New Trier West. Students would be assigned to the schools on the basis of geography. The line separating the districts was gerrymandered—sometimes on a house-by-house basis—to make sure that most of the Jewish students from the western side of town would attend the new high school while the original was reserved for the older white Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities near the lakeshore.

Eventually the North Shore would become so accepting that New Trier closed for the Jewish high holy days, something that seemed impossible when I attended. However, when we were young, the tension between Jewish newcomers and certain members of the established community required us to think about how we fit in. We identified with anyone and everyone who had to deal with exclusion or prejudice. Rahm, for example, became a close and protective friend to the Alanzo boy, the son of the first Mexican-American family to move into our neighborhood. The boy’s father was a preacher and it was obvious that he struggled to support a large family on a pastor’s salary. Jews and non-Jews alike picked on this kid until Rahm took him under his wing.

Fortunately, most of the teachers in Wilmette were sensitive to early signs of trouble among their students and worked hard to make the schools welcoming and safe. Typical was my sixth-grade homeroom and social studies teacher, a novice named Robert Zahniser, who was as excited as he was nervous to face his first classroom full of eager faces. I can still see him, a skinny guy with close-cropped hair, a fading chin that accentuated a prominent Adam’s apple, desperately trying to bring order to the room by knocking on the desktop with his big Slippery Rock State College class ring. I was one of the overeager kids who always had their hands raised and called out “Oh, oh, oh!” to get his attention.

All through the fall I used discussion periods in social studies to start debates on the Vietnam War, presidential politics, and other issues in the news. While he was not a doctrinaire conservative, Mr. Zahniser had what I in my eleven-year-old wisdom considered to be
an unhealthy respect for authority figures. Where Vietnam was concerned, he seemed to believe that if America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts were convinced we needed to fight, we should trust them. I could tie him in knots with questions like: Why do so many middle- and upper-class whites get out of the draft? With the big body counts reported every week, why aren’t we winning? Do the Vietnamese people really want us there?

Zahniser, who actually broke into a sweat during these debates, still appreciated the energy we brought to the classroom. “I was relieved to have some students who jumped into everything so completely,” he said many years later. Zahniser saw the same quality of passionate, intense engagement in Ari, who showed up in his class when he was shifted from sixth grade to fourth.

Ari’s hyperactivity and dyslexia continued to make schoolwork a torture, but he was relentless about doing his best. Zahniser went out of his way to encourage him. This effort included involving Ari in a summer-long psychology experiment that featured a collection of little white mice, a maze, and Pavlov’s theory of stimulus response. Along with a few other kids, Ari got to care for and train a rodent troupe that learned to run through the maze in response to a sound that they associated with a treat at the other end. Like Pavlov’s dogs, they responded even when no treat was to be found.

The psych experiment was a special project but not something out of the norm for schools in Wilmette. Teachers there routinely went beyond the call of duty to help kids in any way possible. In Ari’s case, Robert Zahniser made sure to reward Ari’s great social skills—he was the most popular boy in his grade—and to find activities that would allow him to succeed without much reading and writing.

“Ari,” Robert remembers, “was in this class that happened to have a lot of boys in it and they were a pretty noisy and hyperactive group, which was why I, the only male teacher in the grade, got them. One day when everyone was talking all at once and I was losing control of the class Ari suddenly decided to take care of me. He stood up and shouted, ‘Shut up and sit down!’ and then he pounded his fist on the desk and they all did. Classic Emanuel. You put your heart into everything,
one hundred percent. Of course later I had to take Ari aside and explain that while I appreciated his help, keeping order in the classroom is something I’ll have to do by myself.”

My youngest brother was incredibly sensitive to matters of fairness, especially when it came to kids who stood out as different in any way. Ari became a staunch defender of his friend Michael Alter’s younger brother Harvey, who had profound learning disabilities and endured a lot of teasing.

Harvey was the kind of kid that bullies picked as a target. In one memorable instance a football player who had always rubbed Ari the wrong way decided to make fun of Harvey during lunch in the high school cafeteria. Ari, who was carrying a food tray and walking with Harvey, whacked the bully in the face with the tray and then threw himself at him, punching furiously.

Generally speaking, these fights required my mother to come to the school to hear what had happened and while she might defend Ari in front of a school official, she would always lecture him later. Here was a woman devoted to the antiwar movement and peaceful resistance, yet she was regularly required to come to school to deal with a violent and self-justifying kid who was quick to start throwing punches.

“There’s always a better way to settle things than fighting,” she would say. “What would the world be like if every time one country insulted another they had a war over it? What the world needs is more peacemakers, not people who lose their tempers.” In the case of the bully football player, Ari soon forgot the blow-by-blow details. He had so many fights as a kid that they all ran together. But he would always remember how Harvey, Michael, and his mother appreciated what he did.

Harvey and Michael’s mother, Laura, became something like a favorite aunt to Ari in part because she saw so much of him at her house and at the school. Michael and Ari got into trouble together so often that Laura Alter arrived at more than a few meetings in the principal’s office only to find Marsha Emanuel already waiting.

What struck Mrs. Alter about these incidents, and about Ari in
general, was that he was almost always able to charm his way out of trouble and, even if he could not escape punishment, he always managed to quickly rebuild any relationships he may have damaged. “Even when he was little he had this glibness, a way of talking that helped him get away with things.”

As she got to know our entire family, Laura Alter saw that Ari’s easy way with words, and his ability to disagree and even fight without breaking bonds, came directly from our family. The older we got, the more our dinner table conversation became like a round-robin debate with people taking various sides of an issue just for the sake of arguing. “You liked that movie? Well then, let me tell you why you’re wrong.”

Laura also got to hear, especially from my mother, a brand of politics and feminist values that reinforced ideals that Laura had nurtured for many years but had rarely expressed. When she did, her conservative husband complained that she was talking “like Marsha Emanuel.”

In the late 1960s the northern suburbs of Chicago were home to quite a few women who, like my mother, had a deep interest in social issues and were becoming more outspoken. Behind the picket fences and well-trimmed lawns, Wilmette was one of those places where many seemingly traditional men and women—especially women—were giving serious thought to what were then radical ideas about race, politics, gender, and the war in Vietnam. Consciousness-raising groups sprouted like dandelions and ideas voiced by radical thinkers began to get a hearing in sunken living rooms and breakfast nooks. Laura Alter was among those who were, for the lack of a better word, radicalized by what they read and what they heard in conversation with other women, like my mother.

Unlike ours, the Alter family was more conventional. Bill Alter firmly claimed the role of patriarch and made it clear he thought his views were superior. A real estate developer who became quite wealthy, he was on the conservative side when it came to politics and the roles
of men and women. During a business trip to New York with her husband, Mrs. Alter visited a favorite great-aunt who had been a card-carrying communist. On the spur of the moment she joined an antiwar march on Fifth Avenue. By coincidence, Bill happened to get out of a cab at a spot where the parade was passing and saw his wife, who was dressed in a bright orange designer outfit. Later Bill Alter scolded her for making a spectacle of herself, but she stood proud. The moment marked the beginning of a new phase of life that would lead her to more activism, college, and then graduate school.

Laura Alter’s move away from the life of the traditional homemaker and toward a renewed engagement with the world was repeated a thousand times over in Wilmette. More than a few men were able to see their wives’ point of view, and liberalism, which included equal rights for women, opposition to the war, and a generalized distrust of authority, came into fashion. Wilmette was even a stop on Jane Fonda’s fund-raising tour on behalf of veterans’ groups opposed to the war.

Liberals in our community found both spiritual and social support at a synagogue called Am Yisrael, which was a hotbed of activism. The congregation was led by Rabbi William Frankel, who had been born in Vienna in 1923 and had lived under Nazi rule as a child. In 1966 he was one of three rabbis who marched with Dr. King in Chicago and invited him to speak at three suburban temples. The congregation’s Friday night lectures became standing-room-only venues for politicians, writers, and others who talked about all the vital issues of the day.

Even though we were just kids, we were encouraged to attend the lectures and were welcomed to ask questions, like anyone else. The first time I tried this was when the archconservative Philip Crane was running in a special election for the House seat vacated by Donald Rumsfeld, who had been appointed to serve in the Nixon administration. We were studying ancient Greece in school so I asked Crane, who was a super-hawk on Vietnam, why he chose to act like a Spartan instead of a more enlightened Athenian. Although I don’t recall it now,
Crane, who held a doctorate in history, probably gave me a pretty good answer. I do know that he went on to win the election and many more after that.

Although I was already a bit of a nerd when I arrived in Wilmette, the feedback from teachers, other students, and parents in Wilmette fueled my obsessions. In fact, the whole educational endeavor in our new hometown seemed designed to supercharge ambitious kids with a continuous loop of educational challenges, support, and rewards. In my case the best early example of this process was my project for a class about the Middle Ages. I chose to create a replica of Harlech Castle in Wales.

My neighbor Mitch Cohen, who lived directly across the street, agreed to be my partner. I also got help from my mother’s cousin Jack Skayan, who had come to live with us while recovering from hepatitis he contracted while traveling. Jack had studied some architecture in college and had an artistic streak. We commandeered the linoleum floor of our family room. At first Ari and Rahm teased me for being a nerd obsessed with creating a glorified dollhouse. They hung back while Jack, Mitch, and I glued the cardboard base, laid out the floor plan, and sketched the location of the outer walls, the four main towers, and all the buildings. Using X-Acto knives, pliable rulers, and surgical tools lent by my father, Jack, Mitch, and I scored hundreds of individual “bricks” on balsa wood, rounded pieces for turrets, and glued walls together. As they watched the castle take shape Ari and Rahm became interested enough to volunteer their help. They painted the “water” a deep blue and used our mom’s hair dryer to heat up clay so it would be easily shaped to form the contours of the countryside.