Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (11 page)

John Downs was a real, all-American dad in a way my father never was. He grew up on a Wisconsin farm. He drove a sporty white Thunderbird with red leather seats, played baseball with us, and put up a basketball hoop on the garage in the alley. On any given Saturday he might announce that he was headed for “the country” and invite anyone so inclined to come along for the adventure. Rahm, Ari, and I were always game. Often we would wind up at some farm outside the city where John simply pulled his car up to a barn, honked the horn, and asked if we could have a look around. Invariably the proud farmer would take us on a tour and we’d get to see lots of cows, pigs, and perhaps a few horses. Exotic sights to us city slickers.

One summer, John enlisted us in the design and construction of a wooden go-cart from scrap lumber and a set of wheels stripped from an old grocery cart. He then had the brilliant idea to challenge the kids in the building next door to build a similar contraption so we could race in the cobblestone back alley. We made up pairs of pushers and drivers and clattered up and down the brick alley for hours. On other occasions, the alley was the site for kickball or Wiffle Ball games. When John returned from trips to see his wife’s family in Texas, he demonstrated the fine art of setting off M-80 firecrackers. Our father, who was more cerebral and not handy with tools, and, quite frankly, too busy for hanging out in the alley, would never have done any of these things. But to their credit, my parents never discouraged us from hanging out with other adults, learning from everyone we met.

Thanks to neighbors like John Downs and the large number of kids being raised in nearby apartments, our little stretch of Winona was a busy and happy place. We would think nothing of running down the block and pounding on a door to find out if a friend was up for a visit or a game. When Downs’s daughter was born, Rahm, who loved
babies, would show up unexpectedly and report, “I’m here to feed Ana Maria.” Apparently Mrs. Downs had once told him, “Of course you can feed her sometime,” and Rahm held her to the promise, many times over.

Although people tend to idealize the past—everyone was friendly, every neighborhood was perfectly safe—I know that the few blocks around our apartment were an oasis of safety and kindness. Eddie wasn’t just the manager of the drugstore. He was someone who looked out for us when we passed by his shop and let us stop inside to dry off when we got caught in the rain. However, even in a safe neighborhood the city posed a few dangers. In the early 1960s robberies and muggings occurred regularly in Lincoln Park. More danger waited three or four blocks to the west, in areas where gangs were starting to take control of certain street corners. Then there were the anti-Semites, who seem to exist in almost every place and time. Ari, Rahm, and I experienced our first brush with this problem when I was in third grade. Eight or nine of us were playing in the alley behind our apartment when one of the boys called Rahm a kike.

My “Take it back!” was answered by the oldest kid in the group, who happened to be a girl. “Don’t you dare take it back,” she ordered. When the offender stood firm, with his chin thrust out, I took a swing at him. He swung back and in an instant we were punching, scratching, and wrestling with each other.

Rahm and Ari were six and four at the time so they just stood on the sidelines yelling as the other boy and I threw punches and wrestled on the ground. Neither of us did much damage, but doing damage was not the point. The point was that we had been insulted and bullied and we would not stand for it. There would be more fights in the future, and Rahm and Ari eventually battled at my side. After each fight, we would walk home talking heatedly about who won and who lost and how
they
were wrong for starting the fight in the first place. My mother and father were not alarmed when we got into these scrapes. I think they understood how they happened and knew that as
long as we were small and the injuries were minor, it was good that we stood up for ourselves.

It would be hard to say that the kids we fought with in the alley had a real understanding of the bigotry they showed. These fights were mostly based on the idea that we were somehow
supposed
to hate each other because we were different. We
were
different in some obvious ways. We came from different religious backgrounds. The other kids also noticed that we seemed to get a lot of breaks from school that they did not get. This was especially true early in the school year when our Jewish day school closed for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. Considering their own struggles to get back into the discipline of academics after summer vacation, our Jews-only holidays made us seem unfairly privileged.

Also, I have no doubt that some of the resentment that was focused on us rose out of insecurity and fear. Many of the newcomers to the neighborhood came from Appalachia seeking jobs and fleeing rural poverty. In Chicago life for them was strange, uncomfortable, and filled with rejection. Scorned by people who called them hillbillies, the kids who cursed at us were scared and lonely and angry and we were convenient targets for their built-up rage. As the sons of a foreign-born doctor who lived in a big apartment, we probably represented everything that seemed unfair and out of reach.

What the kids from Appalachia failed to understand was that we were outsiders, too. In the 1960s Jews in America were a distinct minority subject to plenty of discrimination. Sometimes the effects were direct. For example, my father was not given privileges at certain hospitals, like Northwestern. In other cases you just knew that parts of society were unfriendly. Many of Chicago’s private clubs were closed to Jews in the 1960s and Jews were still excluded from certain suburbs.

To my parents’ credit, we did not spend any time worrying about where we might be excluded. Instead, we considered ourselves full citizens and believed we had the responsibility to fight for all the cherished rights this status confers. We also assumed that the country we loved belonged to us just as surely as it belonged to the descendants of the
Mayflower
families. Perhaps the only difference was that my father
possessed a “recent immigrant’s” sense of wonder and excitement about discovering opportunities for earning one’s way to unheard-of wealth and security. It was in this spirit that we began a series of long-distance driving vacations that allowed us to see the breadth of both the American landscape and its culture.

For our first big road trip, my father rented a small camper, the hard-shell kind that you pull behind your car, and loaded up our blue Rambler station wagon with blankets and food and drinks. The whole family, including Savta, piled in and he pointed us toward U.S. Route 66. In the city that we left behind, civil rights leaders were planning for a mass rally at Grant Park, where, in a few days, Mayor Richard Daley would be booed off the stage by ten thousand angry citizens. Another speaker would be drowned out by voices in the crowd, including some that cried, “Kill him!”

As Chicago simmered, we Emanuels spent two weeks traveling to Colorado for a vacation. We traveled in classic American family road trip fashion, with a few variations based on my father’s priorities. He always preferred adventure over creature comforts, which meant, for example, that we tried to avoid restaurants. Since my brothers and I could eat, literally, a dozen or more sandwiches per day, this meant that our mother got no vacation from her duty as quartermaster and cook.

The seating arrangements inside the sky-blue Rambler typically found my father behind the wheel while my mother sat in the backseat, where she could tend to Ari and Rahm, who were both in car seats. These were rare at the time, but because my mother was a stickler for car safety we used them religiously. Savta sat in the front passenger seat by the window and I squeezed between her and my father with an American Automobile Association planner called a “TripTik” in my hands. These little booklets contained maps with yellow highlighted routes that could guide you through an entire road trip. I loved being the navigator who kept track of the passing landmarks and was authorized to raise my voice above the din of conversation to bark an
order to “turn right!” or declare, “We’re going the wrong way!” My role as navigator was a source of envy for Rahm and if he pestered my parents enough they would tell me to let him handle the TripTik for a while. During one of these moments he screamed, “Stop!” When my father testily asked why he should stop, Rahm noted that the road we were traveling was gray-black and the route on the map was colored yellow. “Dad needs to find the yellow road!” My father was not pleased, to say the least.

As anyone who has taken a long family car trip knows, our adventures were also mixed with other kinds of stress and occasional mishaps. Besides being responsible for our care and feeding, our mother, who also had to keep her eye on a not-so-cheerful mother-in-law, inevitably suffered a meltdown or two per trip. And the first one frequently occurred at the start, just so everyone knew who would be dictating the emotional tenor of the trip. My father never saw the reason to spend a lot on hotels or motels. “You just lay your head down and leave the next morning. Why do we need a fancy room?” he would always say. Typically, very few of the motel rooms he selected were ever up to our mother’s higher but not very stringent standards. The same was frequently true for restaurants. Whenever she was unhappy she would start complaining about something and end up delivering an endless monologue of criticism. Observations on the mildew in a motel shower, the chilly air in the camper, or the ugliness of the campground would be followed by more generalized complaints about how we were inconsiderate and unkind and ungrateful.

In the early days, my father would catch much of the heat because he botched the plans for the trip, ignored her advice, or failed to be helpful in some way. When Ari, Rahm, and I were the focus of these rants it was because we were too loud or fighting too much. I know now that these outbursts came from a woman being pushed beyond her capacity. She never liked camping, and considering that she had to take care of us, these adventures hardly amounted to a vacation for her.

At the time, however, we boys were usually shocked by our mother’s emotional storms, which arose suddenly and were followed by a stunned silence that could last a hundred miles or more. Sometimes
we would pray for a little mishap to break the tension. Not infrequently, we got one.

On the 1963 expedition we hit just about every tourist attraction you can name between Chicago and the foot of the Rockies without major incident. As we approached the mountains, my father directed our attention out the window and reminded us to appreciate the view, which included massive stands of Douglas fir and blue spruce climbing up the mountainsides and, in the distance, snowcapped peaks. Simultaneously, my safety-conscious mother told him to forget about the view and keep his eyes on the road.

The gawking was easy on the gentler slope of the foothills. When we reached steeper inclines and the two-lane highway became a series of switchbacks, my father had to focus more intently on the challenge of keeping the car and trailer moving forward. Signs that warned K
EEP IN
L
OW
G
EAR
were new to him. He did not understand that he was supposed to slip the handle of the automatic transmission out of drive and into the slot marked “L” to prevent a stall. As the incline got steeper and the sheer drop beside the road grew more terrifying, the car shuddered and stalled. He slammed on the brakes to keep us from sliding backward.

“Get out and put some rocks behind the wheels!” he screamed with panic in his voice.

My mother and I scrambled out of the car and searched for the biggest rocks we could find. These chocks stopped the slip-sliding car and gave my father a chance to calm down. They did nothing, of course, for the long line of vehicles that quickly collected behind us, with drivers honking their horns and revving their engines. My father restarted the car and struggled to get the car to move forward. Shudder, stall. Shudder, stall. Finally one kind fellow traveler got out of his car and walked up to tell my father that despite the fact that the transmission was automatic, he needed to use the low gear to climb the mountain. With that reassurance, my father restarted the Rambler, put it in “L,” and eased off the brake, and we crept forward.