Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (29 page)

“Dad?” said Rahm again.

“Be quiet,” said my father.

“But Dad!” said Rahm, more forcefully.

“I said quiet!” shouted my dad.

Finally, with Rahm again tugging at his sleeve and his eyes adjusted to the light, my father could see that he had been trying to arrange for family accommodations at a bordello. He quickly turned and steered Rahm to the door. When they returned Rahm was grinning with sheer delight and my father, knowing that my mother was already severely irritated, struggled to deflect inquiries into his faux pas.

Once we settled into a hotel, we went in search of dinner. My father always taught us that in European cities the place to purchase the maximum amount of calories for the lowest possible cost was the main train station. The Hamburg station was an elegant old hall with a second-floor dining room overlooking the concourse. But we noticed none of it as we navigated the hall. Furious, my mother was silent and so were we. Eventually a waiter dressed in a black suit and white shirt brought us menus. My father used his pidgin German to order for us.

Sometime in the middle of the meal, a voice came over the loudspeaker to announce a train departure. “Achtung! Achtung!” My mother’s face turned white. In unison we dropped our forks, rose from our chairs, and hustled out of the station restaurant. Our collective reaction, more a reflex than anything conscious, reminded me how deep this anti-German feeling had been instilled in us.

Indeed, I didn’t return to Germany until the mid-1990s, when I was invited to present to a medical ethics conference and my rabbi at Harvard Hillel, himself a Holocaust survivor, insisted that I go to contribute to the flourishing of humanistic thought in Germany. There I was pleasantly surprised to find many people, from the middle-aged academics to graduate students, more open and apologetic about the Holocaust, and genuinely interested in my views as a Jew. In my experience—and to their credit—the Germans had engaged in a serious and reflective engagement with their culpability for my people’s deaths.

After an uneasy night in the hotel we picked up the car, which had been repaired with a new starter, and drove the short distance to the
border with Denmark. There, at the crossing, Ari, Rahm, and I took special note of the many garishly decorated Danish sex shops with neon signs that invited travelers arriving from staid old Germany to come in for a good time.

In the summer of 1972 my mom, Rahm, and Ari went to Israel, mainly to see the Big Bangah and Sophie, our grandmother, who had, at last, managed to emigrate and settle south of Tel Aviv in a relatively poor neighborhood of Bat Yam. I got the “privilege” of living at home with my father for most of the summer while I did high school biology during summer school. Once the course ended, my father and I would take a trip together to Europe, just the two of us.

In Wilmette my father and I became like
The Odd Couple
. As Felix to his Oscar, I did most of the cleaning and cooking, becoming quite proficient in the art of backyard grilling. For his part my dad enjoyed the peace and quiet of nights free from the sound of boys fighting, and delighted in having full control over the TV.

When all the dissection and tests of my biology course ended, my father and I flew to Luxemburg and headed for Zurich, Switzerland. Our first stop would be at the home of Albert Richter, a physician my dad had known during his residency at Mount Sinai in Chicago. A religious Jew, Albert had depended on my dad to cover for him on Saturdays. This little arrangement helped them become close friends. In the late 1950s, Dr. Richter, a pediatrician, had returned to his home country to practice.

Following my father’s method, we traveled without a detailed plan and instead just stopped to take in interesting sights. As the sun began to go down we looked for a room with breakfast. My father always asked for just one bed, which we shared. He would call me “the propeller” because of my constant tossing and turning, which interrupted his slumber. Mind you, he was never bothered enough to pay for two beds.

Naturally, Oscar and Felix got on each other’s nerves from time to time. We bickered for hours during a drive from the French Riviera
to Milan, where my father insisted we go see the great Gothic cathedral. Luck allowed us to reach the center of the city and park right next to the cathedral. My father ordered me to grab the camera and we hopped out of the car, locked our doors, and slammed them shut. In an instant my dad realized that he had left the keys in the ignition switch—with the car running. Since we had just topped-off the tank before entering Milan it could probably idle like that for half a day or more.

“Watch the camera!” my father shouted at me, his voice rising with panic.

He dashed across a wide boulevard and into a nearby department store, where the clerks were closing for their lunch break and afternoon naps. Crazed, my father grabbed two clothes hangers and ran out without paying for them. When he returned to the curb he paused for a moment to catch his breath and then proceeded, in his clumsy way, to fashion one of them into a long hook that might be snaked through the rubber gasket that sealed the car door.

Unfortunately the car was very well sealed and the wire was too thick and inflexible. As he struggled, my father—in his semi-panic and buried annoyance at himself—alternately explained what he was doing and shouted at me to find some way to help him.

Not surprisingly, my mechanically challenged father was not able to negotiate the hanger trick. Nevertheless, his antics did attract a veritable United Nations of onlookers, including Italians, Germans, French, North Africans, Swiss, and even an Israeli couple. Each one of these observers offered advice encapsulating their national character. For instance, the Italian fellow kept gesturing in a way that said, “Just smash the front window.” The Frenchman just slowly walked around the car examining it for a possible opportunity but never offering a useful suggestion.

After about an hour and a half, the serious German guy loosened the rubber around the vent window on the driver’s-side door. I was then able to snake my thin left arm inside to unlock the door. With the crowd laughing and applauding my father shouted at me, “Get in!”

When we were both seated in the car he turned the key to the off
position and silenced the motor. He then started the car again and put it in gear and hastily pulled out of the treasured parking spot.

“Where are we going?” I inquired in a puzzled way, since we had not entered the cathedral.

“Lake Como,” he said, making it clear we weren’t going to see the inside of the Milan cathedral no matter how majestic it was.

About that name—Jonny. It wasn’t until I saw the invitations my parents prepared for my bar mitzvah that I discovered my full name. As my mother explained, the name Ezekiel had belonged to my father’s father, who died two years before I was born. She also told me that she did not like the sound of Ezekiel as a baby’s name and that she had called me Jonny to spare me unnecessary teasing in America.

This explanation made sense on some levels, but was incoherent on others. For one thing, she wasn’t at all concerned about teasing when she sent us to ballet lessons. Moreover, she had named her subsequent kids Rahm and Ariel—hardly sparing them teasing because of their unusual names. Rahm especially encountered problems as people would pronounce it Ram or Ron and, after being corrected, derisively ask, “What kind of name is
that
?” What became obvious to me was that the paramount consideration had always been her personal preference. She always loved the name Jonathan, and Ezekiel represented the tense relationship with her mother-in-law. But now I had the power to decide for myself.

The Ezekiel of the Bible was a prophet to the Israelites in exile in Babylon. He had railed against sin, called his people to faith, and predicted the rise of a new Jerusalem. This was inspiring, but my decision was also guided by the rebelliousness of adolescence. It would be Ezekiel. Understanding that everyone in Wilmette knew me as Jon or Jonny, I wasn’t going to ask everyone to immediately call me something else. Instead I registered for high school classes using the name Ezekiel, and I began writing Ezekiel Jonathan Emanuel on my papers at school. And when high school teachers tried to pronounce Ezekiel, I quickly corrected them and said they could call me Jon or Jonathan.
I finally completed the change when I entered college and no one, except one senior, knew me from high school. Eventually, Ezekiel was shortened to Zeke.

The preparation for my bar mitzvah gave me the time and opportunity to consider my identity. Roughly translated,
bar mitzvah
means “son of commandment” and marks the moment when a Jewish boy becomes responsible for his own adherence to the Torah. Bar mitzvah rites are often mocked and people love to tell stories about the excessive celebrations and the nervous children with squeaky voices reciting portions of the Torah in mangled Hebrew with little or no understanding of what they’re saying. But something in me longed for a deeper experience. In part I think this was because my Torah portion comes at the very end of the Bible—it is one of the three “endings”—and is one of the few in the Bible that is written in two columns of poetry and contains a warning and promise to the nation of Israel about how to live.

Our temple offered basic bar mitzvah preparation from a tutor who was knowledgeable and sincere, but focused only on teaching each student how to recite the prayers and his portion of scripture. These study sessions did not provide—nor were they intended to provide—any intellectual insights into the texts or explorations of any existential questions about Judaism. I was vocal and angry about my dissatisfaction with this rote learning of my Torah and Haftorah portions. Deep down I was probably expressing frustration at the fact that I had a horrible voice and—thanks to my mom—could not carry a tune. But I was also frustrated by learning meaningless words in a foreign language without the opportunity to use my brain to figure out what they really meant. I demanded that I stop these vacuous lessons and that we find a bar mitzvah tutor who would do Bible study with me. We were too close to the bar mitzvah, and I had too much to learn to change courses. But my parents agreed to help me find some Bible instruction—after the bar mitzvah was done. In the meantime I buckled down to memorize my portion, and made do with some special encouragement from the Big Bangah.

Grandfather Herman supported me with a symbolic tribute that
irritated him but thrilled me. My wish was for him to stop shaving. I liked the way he looked in a beard. It softened his face and made him seem sage-like and more approachable. He didn’t like the way it felt on his face or looked in the mirror. Grudgingly, however, he grew the bushy white beard for me.

Around this time, the Big Bangah and our grandmother Sophie moved into my father’s study, but not quite by choice. Herman had yearned to live in Israel for some time. He talked about it often, though we were still surprised when he abruptly sold his business, canceled the lease on the apartment he shared with our grandmother, and disposed of most of their belongings.

“It’s time,” he announced. “We’re going to Israel.”

There was only one small problem: As a young boy Herman had come to America with no official papers. Once he arrived he never tried to go abroad. So, while he worked, paid his taxes, had a driver’s license, and a Social Security number, he never obtained a passport. But without documentary proof of his citizenship he was, technically, an illegal immigrant and could not get a passport. Without a passport, he and Sophie could not emigrate. When he found out about these obstacles, Herman, having made himself homeless by giving up his apartment and selling its contents, decided his only option was to move in with us on Locust Road.

The resolution of Herman’s immigration status would require two years of waiting and, ultimately, the intervention of Congressman Sid Yates, who was both Jewish and a Democrat. But even with Yates on the case, the bureaucracy moved slowly. In the meantime, my grandfather’s fuzzy face brought tears to my eyes when I spoke at my bar mitzvah. And the moment the service and party were over, Herman’s beard disappeared down the drain, never to return.