Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (35 page)

When he’d recovered enough to be aware of what was happening around him, Rahm noticed that his roommates, who had cancer or complications from cancer treatment, were extremely sick. In fact, three of them died during his time in the room. After the third one passed away, our mother insisted our father finally pay to have Rahm moved into a private room. Typically, initially he resisted, which led to an argument that was amplified, no doubt, by the terrible stress—and sense of guilt—that both my parents were feeling. Eventually my mother won. In relenting, my father gave some ground without explicitly accepting responsibility for Rahm’s condition.

Rahm’s general condition improved as the medicine began to take effect. His fever came down and he became more lucid. The nurses caught his eye and he began flirting with them to get their attention and extra helpings of ice cream at lunch and dinner. However, even as
Rahm’s sepsis abated and his general health improved, his finger did not get much better. At the point of the injury, where the slicer may have actually nicked the bone, Rahm’s bone infection resisted every drug the doctors tried. After about four weeks using intravenous antibiotics, the doctors told Rahm and our parents that the best option would be to amputate his finger and send him home.

As my mother noticed, Rahm had become a different person during his illness. He was still quick-witted and still joked and flirted with the nurses and the girls from school who came to visit. But he was also more sensitive and prone to worry. When a friend, whom he would recall as “a schmuck,” said that Rahm was likely to miss his first semester at college, Rahm became so upset that he grabbed a glass bottle that contained intravenous solution and threw it against the wall, smashing it to pieces. He was determined to get out of the hospital and get on with his life.

Faced with the facts, my brother eventually agreed to the amputation. Less than a day later the surgeon discovered that half of the finger was okay, and cut just below the second joint on his middle finger. With no more bacteria breeding in his bone, Rahm quickly recovered. Darcy was startled by his good humor. “When they unwrapped the finger after the surgery the first thing he did was flip the bird,” she recalled. “He said something about how he’ll have to do it twice from now on, for people to get the full effect.”

Between his hospital stay, recovering from the infection, and letting his finger heal, Rahm completely lost the carefree summer between ending high school and starting college. After he recovered, no one ever said much about Rahm’s semiconscious tirades or the arguments that raged between my mother and father. Rahm told me much later that “nearly dying was the single most important thing in my life.” He said it changed him from a quiet, relaxed kid into a young man filled with the need to succeed and make something of himself. “Before the accident I was very relaxed,” he says. “Post the accident: no.”

For me, Rahm’s hospitalization was both frightening and fascinating. I visited every day on my way home from a summer job as a research assistant in a laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital on the Near
South Side. By the time Rahm was out of the extreme danger zone and intensive care unit, I would bring him a special onion soup he loved from a restaurant near the hospital; we would lie in bed together watching TV and just talking about the attractive nurses. I also recall being impressed by the way a small injury—a cut finger—could quickly bloom into a life-threatening illness. Although no one mentioned it at the time, it was just this process, infection from a small superficial wound, that had killed our father’s brother Emanuel back in Israel.

Finally, Rahm was able to leave the hospital after a total of more than six weeks. This would give him less than a month to gain back some of the weight he lost, and hang out with me and Ari, who had returned from Israel.

By the time Rahm got to Sarah Lawrence, I was already two years into my education at Amherst. No one on my mother’s side of the family had ever gone away to a four-year college. Although my father had studied in Europe, his experience wasn’t remotely similar to what an undergrad encountered in the United States in the mid-1970s. At Lausanne he had followed a program that called for lots of independent study, with only three final exams in six years of medical school, and absolutely no campus-style social life. I would be the first in the family to attempt the adjustment to an institutional subculture of dormitories, dining halls, and tradition, which, until recently, had offered precious few opportunities to Jews.

I arrived at Amherst with unreasonable expectations. Given its exclusivity, small size, and reputation for academic excellence, I hoped I would find a bigger version of my New Trier West peer group. In my imagination, most Amherst students would share my rabid devotion to competitive studying, intellectual jousting, and debate about big ideas. I also hoped that extracurricular life would revolve, at least partly, around politics and protest. This was what college looked like
to me, through the lens of the media and from my experience on the barricades at Northwestern. This expectation only grew when I heard that the president of Amherst had participated in an antiwar sit-in at nearby Westover Air Force Base and campaigned for women to be admitted to the school. This information reinforced my hope that I would find plenty of like-minded folks who would be excited to talk into the night about democracy in America, affirmative action, and a hundred other topics.

Instead I found lots of really smart students who worked very hard but also devoted themselves with equal intensity to parties, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Ridiculously, I had not fully thought through that I would be in the last entering all-male class, thus within the residual atmosphere of an all-male college. Although a few dozen, mainly older, women transfer students could be seen on campus my first year, female freshmen would only be admitted the next year, and true equality for women at Amherst was still years away. As a result, the college remained a haven for those chauvinists who refused to see women as little more than sex objects and it permitted a level of alcohol consumption that approached both the medical and social definition of poisonous. These elements of campus life were a big disappointment for a kid hoping for an academic utopia where we studied big ideas of every sort and then applied them to life in the outside world through writing, activism, and even public protest.

Of course, when I left home I did not realize that the intense and engaging environment I experienced among an elite group of students at New Trier West and hoped to find at Amherst did not exist there, or at any other college in America in the fall of 1975. According to
The New York Times
, a “puzzling calm” had settled on campuses from coast to coast. While students had not returned to raccoon coats and goldfish swallowing, they seemed nervous and inclined to look for comfort in the status quo. They were also affected by the Arab oil embargo and economic recession that made the mid-1970s an anxious time for anyone concerned about jobs and the future of the economy. Fraternities were reasserting their grip on social life and nerdy, bigmouthed,
politically obsessed students like me, who may have enjoyed a brief moment in the sixties when they were respected and even admired, were pushed back to the fringe.

Not surprisingly, I began many relationships at Amherst with arguments. I considered this perfectly normal. Indeed, for me it was a sign of respect. As it turned out, hardly anyone else felt the same way. As Andy Oram, one of my closest friends from college, recalls, “I heard Zeke before I first met him.”

Dislike is a kind way of saying it. In fact, I inspired the kind of feeling that moved others to set fire to my dorm room door and ring my phone at all hours of the night. A fair amount of this hostility was, no doubt, aroused by my sharp-elbow personality. Some came because I was a threat to the get-along attitude that necessarily pervades a small institution. And some came as a reaction to the high scores I posted in pre-med science courses like introductory chemistry, which seriously skewed the grading curve. As Andy Oram recalled it, I was the student who made it harder for others to get A’s. In my mind, we were scholars on equal footing. But they were worried about making the grades required to earn a diploma and get admitted to medical school. I found chemistry and all science classes easy. Many of them struggled. They deserved my empathy and understanding. I needed help grasping this fact.

“Zeke, no one else thinks this way. This is why half the people in the college don’t like you. They think you’re loud, aggressive, and obnoxious. And they’re right.”

It was about 3
A.M
. and Andy and I were speeding along Interstate 90 in his ’65 Plymouth Valiant, somewhere in the vast space between Albany and Buffalo, bound for the Oram homestead in the little city of Jamestown, New York. Jamestown is just twenty miles from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, which makes the drive from Amherst about eight hours. This was just enough time for Andy to begin explaining what was wrong with me.

If you do it right, your first experience living in the adult world far from family and childhood friends forces you to see yourself in a new light. This does not happen without pain and suffering. (Once I realized it, I told my daughters as they were leaving for college that the most important part of their college experience would entail “suffering,” that they would learn the most because of the moments of existential suffering they experienced. Of course, they didn’t believe me, especially because their first few years were largely welcoming and pleasant experiences. But they all got the “suffering” part and were the better for it.)

When I think back on how unhappy I was in my first two years at Amherst, I have to conclude that the transformation is ever more painful the longer and more fiercely you resist it. As an Emanuel, I resisted with instinctive, defensive intensity. Who was Andy Oram to say that my way of doing things was wrong? As far as I was concerned, the problem at Amherst was not me, but the other students—their conventionality and unwillingness to ask the “big questions” of life.

“These are privileged people in an extremely privileged place,” I told Andy. I, on the other hand, could not afford to go home to Chicago for Thanksgiving and never even ordered a pizza on a weekend. “Most of them come from rich families that gave them everything and now they have the opportunity to get the greatest, most intense education available in the country. And what do they do? These fuckheads
waste their time drinking until they puke. Then wait until the last minute to write their papers and don’t do the reading before class.”

Fortunately for me, Andy assumed I spoke with the best of intentions, and he was such a good friend that he would listen and argue all the way from Amherst to Jamestown and never run out of patience—often laughing at my own narrow naïveté. When we finally reached Jamestown I discovered that his family was far more reserved and genteel than mine. Andy and I wore ties for dinner with his mother, who was a widow. But while they were polite, the Orams were also a feisty group and their conversation sparkled with ideas even while it was more mannered than an Emanuel dinner. It was a revelation, to me, to see how a family might enjoy the thrust and parry of debate without raised voices and four-letter words.

When Andy came to my house I was able to see, through his reactions, how life on Locust Road might seem to someone with fresh eyes. In the loud and warm reception we received upon arrival, Andy was taken by my mother’s generous hugs and startled to hear everyone at the house call me Jon or Jonny instead of Zeke.