Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (38 page)

It was Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the ultimate fillip on an aspiring academic’s CV. But I was completely miserable. Adjusting to my new environment had been difficult and now on top of everything I was sick. Alone in the room I had rented in a fashionable North Oxford home, I shivered but couldn’t turn up the heat, because the large room was warmed by a coin-operated heater that required a steady flow of five-pence coins. It was in the midst of the oil crisis that followed the Iranian revolution, and the dollar was in the tank at $2.40 to every British pound. I was paid in dollars and was worried about running out of money. Then, when the sweats came and I was miserably overheated, I couldn’t leave my room for a cool bath, either, because the house rules forbade running water after 10
P.M
. Such was life at the dreary dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Great Britain.

Recession, unemployment, and the traditional British ambivalence when it came to basic comforts meant that my landlady charged for heat by the minute and promised eviction to any lodger who dared break one of her rules. But I was sick, and when my fever spiked at 2
A.M
. I couldn’t take it any longer. The lukewarm bath made me feel
much better and I was able to sleep. The next day, when I came home from the lab, I found a neat, handwritten note on my desk. The landlady curtly informed me that I had broken the rules and must move out. She made it clear that there would be no negotiating on this point. I didn’t even try.

That day I began the search for what would, in the end, be a much better living situation. The location was a small house—two rooms downstairs and two upstairs—on the poor side of town, which I came to share with a young couple named Margaret and Danny. Margaret, a Cambridge graduate and grade school teacher, came from a prosperous family. (They got front-row seats to view the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana.) Danny had grown up in New York, where he attended the exclusive Dalton School. After earning an undergraduate degree at Cambridge he enrolled as a graduate student at Oxford. His rooms at the university were the ones Lewis Carroll had occupied as a math lecturer in the mid-nineteenth century.

At the time when I moved in with Margaret and Danny, I was beginning to question all the little steps that had taken me so far from home. Linda and I had seen far less of each other than I expected, even though she was just fifty miles away. In the meantime, I was alienating the people at Oxford in much the same way that I had alienated the people at Amherst, by being myself.

It all started with the way I conducted myself in Raymond Dwek’s immunology lab. Accustomed to long workdays, I arrived at the lab early and kept working late into the night. In contrast, the doctoral students and full-time technicians arrived at nine, took the usual lunch and tea breaks, and departed at five. My persistence bothered them, but so did the sound of my loud, squeaky voice and my bull-in-a-china-shop approach to getting things done. If I needed chemicals or other laboratory supplies and none were immediately available in the Dwek lab I scoured the other labs in the building until I found what I needed. I followed the same routine when it came to pieces of equipment, from pipettes and beakers to centrifuges. If someone was nearby, I asked them to lend me what I needed. If I came upon a key item that was unguarded, I simply took it.

Yanks, according to British lore, were always too assertive, action-oriented, and ill-mannered. For a while the fuddy-duddies of Oxford circa 1979 tried to excuse my behavior on cultural grounds. But I was even more obnoxious than the stereotype and it wasn’t long before my mentor was hearing complaints.

Fortunately, Professor Dwek, who was thirty-nine and reaching the top of his game, was one of the few in the Oxford faculty who could have tolerated and even encouraged me as I violated one British norm after another. An extremely confident scientist who had worked with colleagues around the world, Dwek was himself a Jew who knew that the British academy did not understand the concept or value of chutzpah. In my own experience, I came to see that Jews were even more misunderstood in England than they were in America. This was made clear to me by the senior technician on Dwek’s staff, who held an Oxford PhD. During the spring break he asked me in his Welsh accent what I planned to do to celebrate Easter. I explained to him that I was Jewish. He then said, “That’s fine, but where will you be going on Easter Sunday?” Despite working for a Jewish faculty member, he simply had no idea that Jews did not celebrate Easter. He really knew nothing at all about being Jewish.

Raymond actually took more than a little pleasure in the ways that I annoyed those colleagues whom he considered to be stuffed shirts. Whenever the outrage over my behavior grew loud, he explained that I was not ill-mannered but simply “American.” He told people to think of me as “the equivalent of John McEnroe,” the tennis player who was as famous for his tantrums as for his championships. Raymond viewed this as a double win—the faculty who he thought deserved it were aggravated by me, and he was able to play the “nice” guy without really doing anything to curb my provocative behavior. Raymond’s work, which involved deciphering the behavior of specific antibodies that protect us from disease, required the kind of intensity I brought to the task. I may not have been the favorite of my peers but I was an effective research associate, and outside of work, Raymond found me and my broad interests—from philosophy to travel to the arts—to be good company.

A teacher who became a friend, Raymond occasionally invited me to dine with him at his college’s high table. This meant donning a coat, tie, and an Oxford black gown and sitting at a long table set on a dais above the undergrad tables in the great eating hall at Exeter College. Raymond saw this as a way to fatten me up with an occasional good meal. Raymond was also kind enough to let me use his faculty rooms in the college for weekends with Linda. And he invited me to dinner at his home. Linda sometimes came with me to the Dwek home, where I hit it off well with Raymond’s wife and four children.

In mid-January I served as photographer for his son Robert’s bar mitzvah party. When the party ended, I hopped on my bike, the standard means of transportation for just about every student—and many faculty members—in Oxford, and headed for my home, which was down the hill, through the center of Oxford to the other, poorer side of the Cherwell River, about three miles away. It was after midnight, and I shivered a bit in the cold air as I sped down the Botley Road and then onto George Street, which brought me into the center of the city. I turned right on Turl Street near Exeter College and then cut left onto the High Street.

I had not gone more than a hundred feet when a police car overtook me, turned on its lights, and then veered into my lane. I swerved to avoid a collision, and was moving out to pass when the police car swerved again, forcing me to pull over to the curb and stop. The driver, a tall and big fellow in uniform, hopped out.

“Why did you not stop back there?”

“I didn’t think you were pulling over for me.”

“We wanted you to stop.”

“What was I doing wrong?” I shot back.

“Are you drunk?” he said, putting his face closer to mine to intimidate me.

“No. I’m not drunk.”

At that time I was a teetotaler, and to demonstrate the fact, I blew into the police officer’s face. Not surprisingly, this gesture did not go over well. The officer’s partner jumped out of the squad car and came around to where we were standing. He announced that I was being
taken into custody for not stopping at a corner and for resisting arrest. They put me in the back of their car and left my bike there to be picked up later.

By the time all the paperwork was completed at the Oxford jail it was well past 1
A.M
. and I decided to postpone calling Raymond for help. The officers walked me down to a stone cell already occupied by some guy who had been brought in earlier in the evening for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. They unlocked the bars and put me inside. I slid down the cold wall and sat on the freezing floor, staring at my unknown and incoherent cellmate, who was thrashing on the lower bunk. The only other furnishings in the cell were a toilet and a vomit bucket, both of which reeked.

At 8
A.M
. the jailers allowed me to call Raymond, who contacted the law lecturer at Exeter College. They came to bail me out. Before I left with my bike, the charges had been changed, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, to riding without a rear light. Ironically, despite my accent and obvious American citizenship, the Oxford police never asked me for my registration card; every foreigner living in Great Britain had to have one, documenting that he or she had registered with the local police every few months. I refused to register, which was a serious legal violation.

I could have simply agreed to the charge against me and avoided a trial, but I am an Emanuel. I wanted my day in court. Two months after my arrest I appeared before the magistrate. When the prosecutor called for testimony from the arresting officers, the two men gave contradictory accounts of what had happened that night on High Street. Acting as my own lawyer, I nervously pointed out the inconsistencies in their stories and argued that no one could draw a reasonable conclusion based on such varied presentations of the facts. However, this was not a hearing dedicated to fact-finding, truth, or justice. The magistrate confined himself to affirming the charges and setting the fines I would be required to pay. He ordered me to pay 175 pounds, nearly five hundred dollars. This was far more money than I could possibly scrape up. Raymond paid the fine and allowed me to work off my debt to him by teaching Sunday school at his synagogue, giving tutorials in
biochemistry to his Oxford undergrads, and grading their final exams for him.

My time at Oxford between 1979 and 1981 was consistent with what many American students there experienced. We were often cold, hungry for decent food, and short on money. This was before Great Britain joined the European Union, imported continental foods, and developed phenomenal restaurants. The only food with any taste was Indian fare. And the combination of the cold and damp penetrated the bones in a way I never experienced in the States. Central heating still had not been installed in many houses; heat flowed from a few coils in small electric heaters that never warmed your body thoroughly. I did, however, enjoy one brief exciting moment when I became famous among the Brits, and also widely despised.

The adventure arose in a roundabout way. BBC television was planning a new show called
Now Get Out of That
. BBC producers advertised in Oxford in the hope of identifying two students—a female undergraduate and a male graduate—to join a four-person “Oxford” team, including a local businessman and farmer, that would be dropped in some remote spot in the Welsh countryside. The Oxford team would compete against a Cambridge team to solve a series of puzzling tasks or missions. If this sounds like a forerunner of the TV show
Survivor
, then you’ve got the idea. First broadcast in August 1981,
Now Get Out of That
was arguably the world’s very first reality outdoor challenge program and it was destined to be must-see TV for four years running.

Raymond Dwek had been dining at the high table in Exeter College with the BBC producer, who complained he could not find a suitable male graduate student for the Oxford team. Raymond considered my daily long-distance running and quirky, assertive personality and suggested me. I didn’t hesitate. In a matter of weeks I found myself in the middle of the vast estate surrounding Eastnor Castle with a camera crew and my three teammates. We were given two days to complete
a variety of challenges using only our wits, our physical abilities, confusing hints, and the meager supplies provided by the producers.

One of the tasks required us to build vehicles out of a collection of four bicycle frames and various parts and then ride across the countryside. Of course, we did not get enough wheels to construct bicycles for each of us. After much wrenching and tinkering, I decided to simply run ahead of my teammates as they pedaled.

A second challenge found us deposited on a tiny island in the middle of a pond, where we were forced to use a cable system to cross the water without getting wet. Forced to spend the night outdoors in a downpour, we were supplied with just two dead rabbits, some carrots, potatoes, and bouillion, and wood for a fire. Falling into classic, gender-defined roles I skinned the rabbits while the two other men made the fire. The one woman on our team—the law student undergraduate—ended up doing the cooking.

For the finale we had to invade the castle, retrieve a mysterious electronic device called “the Beast,” and return to a fixed raft in the castle’s lake. I pushed for quick solutions whenever we reached an obstacle and often simply took over a task when things got stalled. I knew as it was happening that I was being much louder and more direct than the others. They were British, which, in my view, meant they were too passive and willing to follow the rules we were given. The jobs at hand required energy, improvisation, and action, which I supplied in abundance while most of the others alternately followed my orders, argued meekly, or sullenly looked on.