Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  While my mother cooked, Rahm and I busied ourselves with books, crayons, or games. Our play was intense; we both had boundless energy that made us push, shove, run, hide, and wrestle constantly. It was this energy, which my parents tried to accept as much as possible, that posed the biggest challenge to anyone who tried to take care of us. Although she was young and energetic, there were days when Rahm and I ran my mother into the ground. Things would only get worse when the third brother eventually came.

  There were just two Emanuel brothers to contend with when my grandmother arrived in New York by ship in September 1960. My father met her there and on the train to Chicago he told her that a third grandchild was on the way. Savta was actually upset about the imminent arrival of a third child, who would only tie her beautiful boy closer to the American woman who had stolen him from her. This is not to say that she did not love her grandchildren, at least in theory. She did. However, she loved her only remaining son above all others. And no woman, and especially no American woman, would ever be good enough for him.

  In America, Savta tried to impose some order on the household she joined, but she would not have much impact.

  In the days before my mother was to have her third child I became more excited by the hour. When she and my father finally went to Mount Sinai Hospital for the delivery, Rahm and I could barely contain ourselves. We talked nonstop about the brother or sister we were expecting.

  Our frenzy this day was heightened by the uneasiness Rahm and I felt because of our father and mother’s prolonged absence. We had never been separated from them for so long and had been told that we would see, or at least hear from, them “soon.” Hours and then an entire day passed with nothing but occasional calls from my father, reporting that the baby had not yet arrived. What we did not know was that things were going very badly at Mount Sinai. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, which threatened both the oxygen and blood supply to the baby’s brain. The delivery was not progressing, and the situation was touch-and-go. In 1961, cesarean deliveries required general anesthesia and a lot of cutting, which were two things my parents and the hospital staff wanted to avoid. They kept this option in reserve as my mother went through a labor that lasted for thirty-two painful, frightening hours. Emanuel brother number three, whom they named Ariel—Hebrew for “lion of God”—finally arrived on the morning of March 29, squalling and healthy.

  When the phone rang in the kitchen Savta grabbed the receiver and put it to her ear. Rahm and I were playing a game that involved running in circles through the kitchen, dining room, and walk-in pantry. Savta listened carefully and then called, “Jonny! Jonny!” (My full name is Ezekiel Jonathan Emanuel and Jonny was what everyone called me back then.)

  With Rahm following hard on my heels, I stopped to take the phone from my grandmother and heard my father’s voice on the other end. He said everything was all right and there were now three Emanuel brothers.

  “Just what I ordered!” I told my father.

  Two

  CONTROLLED MAYHEM

  “Dai shovavim! Dai!”

  “Stop, you devils! Stop!” Savta shouted at us in Hebrew, but Rahm and I ignored her. We pushed and pulled on my father, who sat firmly on the family room floor with his legs crossed and fought back by tickling and kissing us on our necks.

  The big challenge of these wrestling matches was to try to shove our father over onto the floor. One by one we would attack him from behind. Being left-handed, he would reach across his right shoulder, grab us under our arms, and flip us over in one smooth motion. We got the thrill of being suddenly upside down and the delight of landing in his lap, where we would be cuddled and tickled until the next “attacker” made his move and my father would have to defend himself again.

  These attacks welcomed my father as soon as he arrived home from work. To my grandmother’s eyes this was a gross display of indulgence and disrespect. We were dangerous little beasts ganging up on her beautiful son. The wildness did occasionally result in a gouged eye, a bloody scratch, or a twisted ear, but my father was equal to the challenge.

  For my father, laughter and a little workout provided a much better antidote for the stress of work than a martini or a highball, which were the popular agents of relaxation for his generation. (As far as I can recall, my parents never drank hard liquor and only had wine or beer in the house for occasional parties or holidays.) My dad also knew that we needed ways to discharge enormous amounts of emotional and physical energy. Controlled mayhem did the trick and also wore us out so we would fall asleep quickly after we got into our beds.

  Our dad also believed in giving us generous amounts of affection. In this he was very different from the typical American father of the era. In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children, and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends’ parents who would shake their children’s hands at bedtime. Our dad hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained that he was going to turn us into sissies or homosexuals. But my dad didn’t care. Let them raise their kids in a reserved and reticent way. He grew up in Israel and his boys were going to be hugged and kissed by their father, and know they were loved.

  In time, medical science would discover that both affection and exercise raise the levels of certain hormones—the ones that make us feel relaxed, content, and secure—and aid the development of a healthy mind and body. The positive effects have been seen in studies following babies well into adulthood. For my pediatrician father, this proof was not necessary. He understood, innately, that children—most especially boys—need to express themselves through movement, touch, and even aggression. Like my mother, he valued the individuality of even the smallest child.

  In his practice and outside it, my father approached children with the same interest and respect he might bring to meeting any adult, and he was truly delighted by the experience. With a little boy he might ask, “How do you know you are a boy?” and listen very seriously as, in one case, a four-year-old explained, “I know I’m a boy because I wear a kippah at temple.” My father would answer, “Good thinking,” because he wanted to establish a bond of respect and trust. He knew that a child who trusted him might one day say a few words that would be the key to a diagnosis. Better to be the doctor a kid would confide in, than the one that she fears.

  Sincere conversations also gave my father the chance to observe a child’s movements and thought processes and learn about his personality. Anyone who has spent time with newborns knows that while they all go through the same developmental stages, they come into this world as individuals with widely varied temperaments. Brave babies seek out novelty and show a remarkable ability to adapt to new sights, sounds, and people. Others are wary, and easily overstimulated. Most occupy a spot between the poles, meeting the world with their own peculiar need for both security and new experiences. Similar variations can be seen in a host of traits including levels of anxiety, attachment, fear, and even boredom. Parents can sense the differences in children and know that these differences require them to be flexible caregivers. There’s nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it jazz parenting.

  Analytical, logical, and objective, I asked a great many questions about how things worked and found comfort in the answers. For example, when I learned that one of my father’s young patients—a kid like me—was diagnosed with leukemia I asked endless questions about how the disease developed and how it might be treated. I was very worried about this boy, but also needed to know that it wasn’t infectious and I could not just “catch it” and suddenly fall deathly ill myself. I was reassured as my father and mother answered every one of my questions in a way that helped me accept that leukemia was a rare condition and could not be transmitted from person to perso
n like strep throat.

  My way of considering things was accompanied by a powerful tendency to experiment—poking, prodding, testing—and to talk, and talk, and talk about everything I saw and felt. Talking about something from all the possible angles was the way I would come to understand the world and elucidate my own views. To their credit, my parents only occasionally reached the point of exasperation where they begged me to be quiet.

  In contrast, Rahm was quiet and observant, while Ari was forceful, rambunctious, highly social, and hyperactive, and did more moving than talking. He was, in everyone’s eyes, the best-looking of the brothers, a child so cute he could break a window or a lamp and get away with it, flashing his mischievous smile that said, “You can’t possibly stay angry at me, can you?”

  Loud and physically fearless, Ari walked and talked early in order to keep up with his big brothers, and plunged into life with boundless energy and courage. His one concession to dependency was a pink pacifier that he used to soothe himself right up until he was about to go to kindergarten. As a toddler with the pacifier in his mouth he greeted one of my mother’s fellow civil rights activist friends, Roz, a grown woman, with the question “Onna fight?”

  We grew up in a home where the adults enjoyed being parents. In fact, our mother considered raising us to be the most important job she would ever have—her calling. Although she endured lots of ribbing for it, she made an intense study of what the experts said and applied it with her own variations. She was very deliberate in her parenting, always keeping in mind that our development, especially our emotional and intellectual development, depended on our early life experiences. She wanted us to feel that the world was a safe place, where we were loved and free to express our thoughts and ideas. And she endeavored to give us many diverse experiences.

  When it came to feelings, matters were a bit more complicated. We could show love and flashes of other emotions like envy, jealousy, pride, dejection, or remorse. But as I realized later in life, when problems arose we did not have many ways to discuss them deeply. The emotional vocabulary in our family was limited. We were never encouraged to articulate our deeper feelings. Indeed, discussion of how we felt tended to be brief, if not monosyllabic. After a fight or an argument our mother often required us to hug each other and kiss and say we were sorry. In this realm, physicality trumped words. So early on we internalized the notion that it was easier to give someone a kiss or a hug or a punch than to struggle to elucidate and articulate the nuances of our private feelings and emotions. We were not unique in this way, but for people with a proclivity for talking a lot, this gap in our verbal repertoire is a paradox.

  Considering the demands of a household that churned with activity from dawn to dusk it is possible that my parents just did not have the time or energy to resolve our resentments or jealousies. To keep order, our mother issued as few rules as possible, but enforced them consistently. She encouraged us to say what we thought in whatever language adults might use. If they cussed, we could cuss, too. And if a decision was under consideration—where to go on vacation, what movie to see—our input was often solicited.

  She also did her best to encourage our interests, which we tended to choose ourselves. The experience of having choices and the ability to influence decisions in the family makes a child feel empowered and secure rather than dependent and impotent. It is no wonder, looking back, that we grew into assertive adults who were willing to take risks. We were raised to develop our own opinions and believe in our ability to make good judgments.

  This confidence was reinforced by the remarkable amount of freedom our parents gave us from a very young age. In the early 1960s, before milk cartons were decorated with photos of abducted children and supervised “playdates” became the norm, I led my brothers, Rahm and Ari, on expeditions around the neighborhood. Although I was barely six and my brothers were two and four, I was allowed to lead them to the end of the block, across a street—we were always taught to look both ways—and through an underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive, to a public rock garden where we pretended to assault a fort. More often we played on the sidewalk in front of the building or went to the little fenced-in playground in the middle of our block on Buena. The playground offered sandboxes, swings, and slides and enough grass and shrubbery to make the perfect setting to play war or cowboys and Indians.

  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.