Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (6 page)

Hovering over it all, of course, was the tension between the Jews and the Arabs and their shared anger at their British overseers. The bigotry that simmered in Tel Aviv was both conceptual and personal. For example, when my father’s aunt, a nurse, married an Arab doctor she had met in a hospital, the couple went to great lengths to obscure their relationship. The doctor, who eventually became a high official in the health-care system, actually hid behind closed doors when people visited his home because both sides—Jews and Arabs—suspected he was some sort of spy. The man, whom my father knew only as “Dr. Ayoub,” eventually played a key role in his life, but for years he lived in the shadows.

Dr. Ayoub’s fears were well-founded. Both the Jews and the Arabs operated secret security organizations that acted with deadly force, and he correctly feared assassination from both sides. More commonly, Arabs and Jews clashed spontaneously in the streets, with small incidents escalating into brawls that sometimes brought gunfire and fatalities. A smart kid who kept his wits about him could flee before getting caught up in these melees. My father succeeded at this, escaping the fate that befell his brother in order to serve the Zionist cause in a much more prosaic way—clearing land at a distant kibbutz.

Like many other young Israeli men, my father waited out World War II, nursing dreams of a better future that included a sovereign Jewish state. And like most of his peers, he joined a paramilitary group that was preparing for a war of independence. His most dangerous activities involved handing out literature, and plastering political posters on the walls of city buildings at night. The only violence he experienced was when a British officer on horseback caught him trying to paste a propaganda poster on a building. The man beat him with a stick, giving him the only wounds—a series of bruises—he ever suffered in the Zionist cause.

When World War II ended and negotiations over Palestine’s future began, my father looked for a chance to escape the shadow of his brother and see something more of the world. Restrictions imposed by the British authorities made it almost impossible for young men to travel abroad except to study in disciplines unavailable locally. Medicine
was one of those disciplines. My father applied to study at several medical schools in the United States and Europe. Given his lackluster grades, his acceptance at the rather exclusive University of Lausanne in Switzerland was a bit of a surprise.

Whenever my father’s stories focused on his life after adolescence, Ari, Rahm, and I would pay extra-close attention because this was when the juicy stuff, full of obstacles, adventure, and sex, entered the picture. A good example was his passage to Lausanne. In 1946 the British navy policed shipping in the Mediterranean and often sent migrating Jews back to their ports of embarkation. A few captains used daring tactics to evade or outrun the blockade. More than once these races ended with a ship aground on the shore and people leaping into the water and swimming in the Mediterranean to beaches. Against this backdrop, our father very nervously boarded a Romanian ship docked in Haifa for a voyage to Marseilles. His suitcase contained just two suits and a wool coat. In his wallet were a few British pounds. Just before the lines were cast off, police officers stormed onto the ship demanding to see Benjamin Emanuel. When they found him, they took him ashore to a little military post. Terrified, my father was sure he would be denied permission to leave. Instead the officers explained that a friend, Dr. Ayoub, had asked them to make sure he was treated well. Relieved, my father assured them that he was quite happy and returned to the ship. The voyage to Marseilles took more than four days, and traveling to Lausanne by train across the war-ravaged countryside took the better part of another week.

Benjamin Emanuel arrived at the medical school in March. He had no place to live, and was months behind the other students. Somehow he managed to persuade school officials to let him try to catch up with his classmates. He found shelter with a local family but this arrangement was only temporary. “They wouldn’t let you bring women home,” he explained, slyly. In a matter of weeks he found a new place to live with an eclectic group of ten fellow students—French, Caribbean, South American—who occupied most of a small apartment building. It was an easygoing group that shared chores like cooking and cleaning. As my father would recall, the toughest job involved
keeping the coal-fired stoves that heated the place supplied with fuel that was stored in the basement.

Adopting a regimen that would see him through his entire education, my father rose every morning at six and studied in his room until noon. In the beginning, he focused on learning French, since all of his classes would be conducted in this language and he knew none of it at all. With the help of the French
Reader’s Digest
and a translation dictionary he would pass his first oral exam—which was given six weeks after his arrival—with little difficulty.

The six-hour workday plan left my father with plenty of time to go to movies, hang out in cafés, date young women, and generally have fun—or, as he would tell us, “live the life of Riley.” The apartment in Lausanne became the scene of many parties, late-night political debates, competitive chess matches, and romantic escapades. Whenever he brought up the subject of Claire, the beautiful Swiss girlfriend who almost became his wife, my mother gave him a look that instantly changed the story line. But she did let him tell us—many times over the years—the famous “breast cream” story.

The tale begins with a young woman who wanted to win a local beauty contest but was worried that her breasts were too small. With their very best “Trust us, we’re doctors” demeanor my father and his suite mates told her about a new cream they were developing at the medical school that could augment her chance for victory. It was such special stuff that it had to be applied “just so,” which meant that she would have to drop by the apartment every day for weeks so these would-be doctors could carefully and methodically rub it in. She agreed to the plan. The cream was only ordinary moisturizer, but after weeks of the treatment, when she actually won the contest, their “patient” credited the special cream.

In the breast cream story, and most of his other memories, my father is usually the instigator for adventures that involve a host of characters from different backgrounds and cultures. He liked and admired most of his fellow students, except for the Americans. Part of his feeling stemmed from the fact that they were rich. Living off the GI Bill and a very favorable postwar exchange rate, the American students
could afford cars and meals in restaurants. The other source of my father’s resentment was the feeling that they studied “like parrots,” memorizing facts without mastering concepts. Most performed poorly on their exams and many were still in Lausanne, acting like perpetual students, long after my father graduated.

My father’s graduation was delayed by Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and an escapade that made him seem to us like a character from a James Bond movie. The tale began as Zionists prepared for the war by expanding the paramilitary organizations of Haganah and Irgun. Both secretly bought arms on the world market and recruited Jews, especially those who had fought in World War II, to help acquire them. In February 1948 my father and three friends were approached in Lausanne by an operative who went by the name Ben David. He wanted them to accompany him on an arms-purchasing mission. My father instantly volunteered and joined the others for a train trip to Vienna and then on to Prague, where Czech officials were prepared to sell thousands of World War II surplus rifles to the Jewish paramilitary.

Secret negotiations had led to an agreement on the shipment, which would be made in defiance of a United Nations ban against the sale of military hardware to either Arabs or Jews in the former Mandate of Palestine. Officials all over Europe were on the alert to stop this kind of trade. My father and his mates could be arrested and imprisoned at any moment.

Their first stop was the Rothschild Hospital, which was on a street called Währinger Gürtel in the sector of Vienna controlled by U.S. forces. Once home to a neurological institute headed by Viktor Frankl, the hospital occupied a massive five-story building that had been built in the 1870s and subsequently expanded to serve a growing Jewish population. Shut down as Jews were rounded up during the Holocaust, it became after the war a center for displaced persons. Tens of thousands of Jews from around Europe had transited through the building on their way to Israel.

On the day my father and his nervous friends arrived at the hospital they were told to go to the top floor and knock on a closed door. It
opened into a room where a couple of men sat at a table. Surrounding them were piles of banknotes from various countries, stacked from floor to ceiling. The quantities were enormous and must have amounted to tens of millions of dollars.

Ben David was handed a big valise full of this cash, which would travel with the group to Prague. There they would meet their Czech contacts, confirm that an additional sum of money had been transferred by wire to pay for the arms, and inspect the weapons. They were also given a map showing various banks in the city and told to look in the potted plants in front of each one for a cache of diamonds that had supposedly been hidden by some wealthy Jewish man before he was captured by the Nazis.

The train route north to Prague covered about two hundred and fifty miles. Inspectors at the border checked the passports, travel documents, and belongings of some passengers who were seemingly selected at random. My father and his mates were passed over. Once they arrived in Prague, they found a room for the night, and rested anxiously with their valuable luggage. In the morning, on February 25, 1948, they located the banks and searched all the potted plants, but found no gems in the dirt. When Ben David then tried to make contact with the Czechs, he discovered that during the day, the communists had completed a bloodless coup. All the officials who had agreed to the arms sale were forced out of power. Anyone who had come to Prague to do business with them would be wise to escape. Ben David and his confederates did just that, catching the first available train and crossing the border before it was closed.

The story of the secret mission to Prague, the room full of money at the Rothschild Hospital, and the coup that put our father in danger made him appear bold, dashing, and brave to us. He always emphasized the fact that the whole adventure was a bust, and he never figured out why Ben David needed four clueless Jewish medical students from Switzerland to accompany him. We overlooked these details in favor of fantasies about secret drops in planters, storerooms filled with cash, clandestine rendezvous, and wartime intrigue. The truth probably lay somewhere between the two.

One message of this story for us boys was the idea that when duty and adventure call, you say “Yes!” even if your role is unclear and you don’t understand all the details of the plan. And it came back in full force when President Obama asked Rahm to become his chief of staff. Rahm hated the idea. He had rapidly risen in Congress and thought he had a chance to become the first Jewish Speaker of the House in due course. Giving up his House seat would end that dream. Every day after the offer Rahm would call me and shout into the phone, “I don’t want to do it! I don’t have to do it!” All the while he knew he had no choice, he had to do it. It was his duty. Indeed, he was shouting at me precisely because he knew he was going to serve the president regardless of his personal preferences, and secure in the knowledge that I would never be insulted.

Soon after my father’s safe return to Lausanne, he decided to go home to Tel Aviv and join the forces fighting to create the new state of Israel. He reported to a camp on the French Riviera where volunteers from all over the world, including some non-Jews who believed in Zionism, were being mustered. After a brief orientation, he boarded a small ship bound for the Israeli coast, which ship ran into a storm that caused so much seasickness my father recalled “I needed hours to wash all the vomit off of me.” When he finally arrived, he was first assigned to work as an orderly in a mental institution but soon transferred to active military service on the southern front, near the border with Egypt.

Perhaps because my mother was such a pacifist, the war stories he told us downplayed the fighting, but we heard enough to understand that he had received very little training before he was assigned to what passed for Israeli artillery: a unit that patrolled in jeeps mounted with machine guns. His most daring mission involved an assault on Gaza, where the Egyptian army, which invaded when the Israelis declared their independence, had established a base. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) battle plan called for various units to attack from the south and east. My father’s group won a series of skirmishes as the Israeli forces encircled the Egyptians and cut their supply routes. With little opposition, my father’s unit advanced westward past the border and reached
the Egyptian coastal town of El Arish. There British airplanes dropped leaflets warning them to pull back or face an aerial attack. They beat a rapid retreat. So much for my father’s heroism.

When he spoke of the war my father usually omitted any reference to being shot at by the enemy and firing back. In the first tellings of the war stories, especially the one about the Gaza attack, he said he drove the jeep and when the shooting started he merely fed the ammunition to the machine gunner. Eventually, when we were older, he confirmed that he had taken his turn at the trigger.

Our father harbored no doubts about the Zionist cause or the need for a strong Israeli military posture and he was proud to have done his duty. But he did not talk about the damages his unit inflicted on the other side, and never said anything to suggest that fighting was anything but serious, even dreadful business. In short, he spoke about war in the way of a father who hoped his sons would never see one. If anything, our father’s war stories offered lessons on the unpredictable nature of life and the unexpected consequences that can arise from the choices we make.