Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (5 page)

Every kid who happened along could join in. The neighborhood
was pretty diverse with whites of various ethnicities. There were a few Jews, some Italians, Irish Catholics, and the kids who had come to the North with their parents from Appalachia. On sunny days, we would play until we were summoned inside. When the weather did not allow us to go outside we managed to conduct raids and combat missions indoors.

Sometimes our pretend fights became real. When Ari was still sleeping in a crib, Rahm and I would climb onto the top level of our bunk bed and jump into it with such force that it rattled the hardware that held it together and bounced Ari off the mattress and into the air. The bunk beds were a definite center of aggression. The difference this time was that, unlike Rahm when he was an infant, Ari loved it when we landed in his crib like airborne troops.

We also waged an endless series of skirmishes and sneak attacks. We built forts using pillows and blankets arranged on the lower bunk, which then became strategic ground that had to be defended. Usually Ari and Rahm attacked me, throwing pillows and trying to wrestle me onto the floor. If they prevailed, they would take possession of the little bunk bed Masada, reconstruct its fortifications, and defend it from my attacks as a giant, a monster, or a roaring dinosaur.

Little boys have always been fascinated by fighting and they seem almost biologically driven to act out elaborate mock battles complete with imaginary wounds and melodramatic deaths. Our mother, who was a self-described pacifist, refused to let us have any toy guns, even squirt guns. But there was nothing she could do to prevent us from shaping our fingers into pretend pistols, which we could use to “kill” each other. We did. Many times each day. And at night, when the room was illuminated by one of those little night-lights that plug directly into the wall socket, we prowled in the shadows to make sneak attacks. As a grown man, Rahm would tell me he was never afraid of the dark, or monsters, “but I was scared of the people in the room.” Considering his size, he may well have been wary, if not afraid of, Ari and me, but I remember he held his own during all sorts of combat.

Our father, who was working hard to establish his practice and make us solidly middle-class, often came home after dinner had been
served because he had to make house calls, visit patients in the hospital, or handle appointments on Monday and Thursday nights, when the office was open until 9
P.M
. Depending on the time, we would mob him in the dining room or he might help with baths and getting us into pajamas so that my mother could give us each our nightly time alone with her. This habit of making sure she spent fifteen or twenty minutes with each of us, either talking or reading to us, was something she started when Rahm was a toddler and it probably went a long way toward making sure we each felt we received the individual attention we needed. As she explained it to me once, “Every child should feel like he’s as special as an only child, for at least a little time every day.”

Maintaining this routine was not always easy. Our wild play sometimes produced real bruises and bloody wounds that required serious intervention. When I was five, I once missed the seat of a children’s chair and hit the back of my head on a cast-iron radiator with a Tootsie Pop in my mouth. The impact knocked three teeth out of my mouth and left a fourth dangling by a little strand of tissue. A few years later, Rahm suffered a terrible hand injury. My friend Georgie announced that he had learned some dirty jokes and was eager to share them. We were in the vestibule of his building next door, and he and I decided to dash outside to exclude Rahm from hearing the jokes. Rahm rushed to follow us, and the huge oaken door slammed on his hand.

He was screaming in pain, two fingers crushed and spurting blood. I took him home as fast as I could and there my mother wrapped his injured left hand. In the cab en route to nearby Edgewater Hospital, she struggled and sometimes failed to stay composed. The hand surgeon who unwrapped Rahm’s hand found the two fingertips dangling from shreds of skin. He stitched them back together as well as he could, although to this day they look a little lumpy, as if the tips were hastily pasted on.

I still have a sense of guilt about this episode. Even after all this time some part of me feels I failed in my duties as a big brother. But this would not be the last time Rahm suffered a serious hand injury.
Hands seem to be our family’s Achilles’ heel. Years later Rahm would cut his finger on his right hand at Arby’s and require amputation. And one Sunday on the way to friends’ house for brunch I was caught between my brothers in the backseat of my father’s Pontiac Grand Prix as Ari and Rahm wrestled over an opened can of mixed nuts. Suddenly the tips of two fingers on Ari’s hand were sliced almost completely off by the sharp rim. Blood spurted on all three of us. Possessed, my father drove straight to Mount Sinai Hospital emergency room, where he made a perfect repair himself.

Fortunately, despite constant and intense physical play, deep wounds and broken bones requiring hospital trips were the exception, not the rule, for our day-to-day lives. Our more common mishaps were minor ones, which nevertheless led to howls of complaint. When my mother ran out of patience with our whining, her frustration turned to anger. We would be so lost in whatever frantic game we had concocted that we failed to notice the growing tension and her outburst would surprise us.

Every kid who has ever pushed his mother past the breaking point knows the shocked feeling that comes when you hear her voice reach that certain decibel level and feel the slap of her open hand on your behind or cheek. Tall and strong, my mother could make herself into a physically imposing presence, especially in the eyes of someone who is four feet tall. The leverage supplied by her rather long arms meant that her swats were delivered with a surprising amount of power.

Worse than the physical punishment were the long silences that followed. Time passes slowly for children. My mother could seethe for hours, sometimes even for days, after breaking. The mix of feelings we experienced when this was going on—guilt, confusion, anxiety, loss—was excruciating. Our mother’s dark mood cast a pall over the entire household. Worst of all, we felt powerless to affect it. No apology, dandelion bouquet, or handmade card would make her smile if she wasn’t ready and willing.

Years later my mother would tell us that for every time she lost her
temper or retreated in silence, there were a hundred moments when she was afraid we would push her over the edge and she managed to keep her cool. Of those times when she whacked us or gave us the silent treatment, she would say she was protecting us from something worse. “You boys would drive anyone crazy,” she would say. “Believe me.”

As adults we were able to imagine some of the pressure she felt, especially in the period when she had three hyperactive preschool kids and one judgmental mother-in-law, all jammed into a three-bedroom apartment. Savta could not have been much help. She wasn’t particularly interested in taking care of us, and she often voiced her disapproval of her son’s marriage and criticized my mother’s efforts to be a good wife and parent. She once offered my mother ten thousand dollars to leave our father. My mother never figured out if this was a joke or not.

A lonely widow deprived of her lifelong friends and familiar surroundings in Tel Aviv, Savta would not have been happy in Chicago under any circumstances. As the overprotective mother of one living child, she wouldn’t be satisfied with anyone who married her son. Benjamin Emanuel could have proposed to Golda Meir and Savta would have found something lacking. In Marsha Emanuel, she believed she saw an ambitious American who would weigh her precious son down with too many children and grandiose expectations for the privileged kind of life she saw on American television. Big cars and suburban houses represented to Savta a trap that would prevent her son from returning to Tel Aviv to live. And she was certain that his wicked wife would force him to choose this American life over Israel, which meant that she would have to accept either exile in the United States or life without her son in Tel Aviv.

What Savta did not understand was that my father was the one most devoted to the American dream of a home in the suburbs, two cars in the garage, and a climb up the social ladder. He liked both the challenges and the opportunities of working in the country with the most technologically advanced medicine. He also enjoyed the culture, comforts, and opportunities that surrounded him in the richest country in
the world. Sure, he loved his homeland, and he imagined that he might one day return. But it was my mother who longed for Israel the most. After all, in the short time she had lived there she had had more close friends than she had ever known in America and gold had literally rained down on her from above.

The story of the gold begins in Odessa, on the Black Sea, long before my mother and father were born and, indeed, before the family was even called by the name Emanuel. As pogroms and civil wars blazed across the Russian Empire, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to Western Europe, America, and to what was then called Palestine. Today, millions of families in America and around the world can trace their stories back to these displaced Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. To others, these events can seem like distant history. To us they are both shrouded in faded memories and deeply personal dramas filled with danger and heroism and lessons that echo in our own attitudes and perspectives.

I was told that my father’s relatives left their home in Odessa in 1905 after selling substantial landholdings. With their fortune converted to gold coins and diamonds, they immigrated to Jerusalem. At that time my ancestors went by the name of Auerbach. My father’s father, who was also named Ezekiel, opened a pharmacy financed by an old friend from Odessa who was passing through Palestine on his way to settle in Rome. The pharmacy supported his wife; his eldest son, Emanuel; and the younger Benjamin, who was born in Israel in
1927. Ever suspicious and fearful, Ezekiel hid away the gold coins and jewels against an uncertain future. He told no one, not even his wife, Penina, where he put them.

While not political activists, the Auerbachs were Zionists who supported the ultimate creation of a Jewish state that would be a bulwark against the anti-Semitism and terror they had seen in Europe. Before this dream could be realized, they and other Jewish pioneers who had come to Palestine would have to wait out the British occupation, which had begun at the end of World War I. The Jews and Arabs of Palestine both resented British rule, but during a period that ran from 1930 into the 1940s the Arabs were the most violent in their opposition to both the occupation and to the Jewish immigrants who came fleeing anti-Semitism, oppression, and then Adolf Hitler. Thousands of Arabs and hundreds of Jews died in clashes with each other and with the British authorities. One of them was my father’s older brother Emanuel.

In November 1933, the same month when Marsha Smulevitz was born in Chicago, Emanuel Auerbach was standing on the edge of a conflict between protesters and police in Jerusalem when a bullet ricocheted off the pavement and struck his leg. The wound itself was not life-threatening, but it soon became infected. With effective antibiotics, yet to be developed, Emanuel would have lived. Instead he died of the infection. He was buried in the Mount of Olives Cemetery, which is in East Jerusalem and overlooks the Old City. Soon after their son’s death, Ezekiel and Penina changed the family name to honor their son. On a visit to Israel in 2010, my eldest daughter and I, with the help of an ancient Arab caretaker of the cemetery and a right-wing Jewish settler cabdriver, eventually located the grave, which no one in the family had seen since at least 1948.

Ezekiel and Penina never really recovered from Emanuel’s death. My brothers and I learned this not from my father but from people who knew him as a child. They described my father’s parents as serious, almost grim people who devoted themselves to their business and lived very quietly. As my father’s grade school classmate and lifelong
friend Batya Carmi recalled, “He grew up as an only child but under the dark cloud of his dead brother.”

To slip from under that cloud, Ben spent as much time as possible away from his parents’ store and the apartment. Little interested in academics, but sociable and friendly, he was more like Ari and Rahm than me. Even he would admit that in school he “tried to get the most for the least effort,” which was something he would later say many times about Rahm, another second child.

We boys loved to hear about our parents’ childhood, and storytelling was frequently part of our bedtime ritual. We visited my parents’ bed, en masse, just about every night. Usually our mom read a chapter from a book, but whenever we could get our father and mother to tell us stories from their own lives we were especially attentive.

In later years I was struck with how world events affected the course of my father’s life. As a boy he lived at one of the great flashpoints of history and, while he escaped the Holocaust, he nevertheless knew what it was like to be the subject of violent hatred. He also participated in the founding of Israel and its development as a frontier nation. But as important as these aspects of his life were, my brothers and I were far more intrigued by the tales that revealed our father as a shovav like us.

The Ben Emanuel we learned to know from those stories was a class clown, a middling student, a fantastic dancer, and an avid movie fan. (In one of his stories his best Shabbat white shirt was ripped to shreds in the frenzy outside the theater prior to the local premiere of
Flash Gordon
.) He told us about long days spent at the beach, lots of dances, and a class costume party where he dressed up as Charlie Chaplin. From then on his nickname was Charlie, which stuck, so much so that Batya still calls him that.

Together, the stories they painted revealed a footloose, Huck Finn kind of kid in a sunny Tel Aviv that was more small town than big city. It was Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mediterranean, a place where a boy could roam from the shore to the markets to the cinema and get into mischief without encountering any serious trouble.