Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  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.

  The Israeli victory at Gaza left the Egyptian army trapped in the city and forced its government to negotiate an end to the war. My father left the IDF and returned to Lausanne to complete his medical studies. During his final year in medical school, my father was elected president of the student body. Charming and compassionate, he negotiated with the dean—a famous physician called Blackie—on behalf of classmates who had trouble in their studies. He never forgot the student who outpointed him on the final exam to graduate first in the class. “A big round Syrian guy who never went to the movies, never even took a walk,” my father would say. “But he was all right. So I came in second. Big deal.”

  Always forward-looking, my father set his sights on internships in the United States, which was the best place for a young doctor to learn the practical skills he needed. A weeklong voyage brought him to New York City, where my father arrived with a treasured Parker ballpoint pen and twenty-five dollars in his pocket. The immigration officer who checked his papers said, “A Jewish doctor in America? You’ll be married in a month or two.” My father took just enough time to gape at the skyscrapers before getting on a bus bound for Cincinnati and its world-famous children’s hospital.

  Welcomed into a training program populated by a mix of Americans and foreigners, my father found that the ones trained in the United States were far ahead of him in practical skills. This was most apparent in the emergency room, where the others knew how to take histories, examine patients, and perform dozens of procedures. In Europe, medical students were trained in the theory of medicine, not to perform practical duties. Lost and insecure, he bumbled along for a few months making lots of mistakes. Some of these errors were as minor as a misplaced intravenous line. Others, like an extremely crude circumcision, would have a lasting effect.

  Fortunately, senior doctors helped my father catch up. His extensive medical knowledge and reasoning skills from Switzerland combined with the trial by fire in Cincinnati eventually made him an excellent practitioner. He was an especially good diagnostician, distinguishing common conditions from the unusual cases that needed special attention. During a six-week rotation in a polio ward, where patients were confined to iron lungs, he learned the finer skills of relating to families in crisis. The experience taught him that his own psychological survival required that he maintain some professional distance to avoid having his heart broken every day.

  In his off time, my father took in the wonders of America. Like most immigrants he was amazed by the abundance of food, the music, the beautiful women, and other diversions that were difficult to find in postwar Europe. After a couple of Cuban doctors taught him a costly lesson about poker he decided he preferred jazz clubs to gambling and he spent many a night in Cincinnati’s black neighborhoods, where the live music, performed by some of the greats, such as Louis Armstrong, could be heard all night long.

  Despite being in Ohio, Cincinnati was, at the time, very much a southern city, where whites and blacks rarely socialized together. Raised in Israel and having spent six years in Europe, where there were few blacks but they were well integrated into society, my father was completely oblivious to this racial taboo and could never understand why anyone cared. But he raised a few eyebrows when he began to date a black woman. Indeed, he was called in by the head of the hospital and informed about the color line. If he wanted to stay on staff, he was told, he would have to end the relationship. He continued to see the woman surreptitiously until the relationship ended in its own way. He raised many more eyebrows when a local mobster learned that my father had been flirting with his girlfriend.

  The woman in question had been hospitalized for a nose job. The plastic surgeon assigned my father to change her dressing daily. She was so beautiful that my father did the job three times a day. He and his patient hit it off so well that eventually her boyfriend became concerned.

  Based across the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky, the local Mafia wasn’t exactly Murder Inc., but it was a force to be feared. And though he did not realize it, my father’s flirtations were so dangerous that they quickly became the talk of the hospital.

  Matters turned serious when two suspicious men pulled up to the hospital in a fancy new Buick Roadmaster and entered the lobby. They asked an alert hospita
l receptionist where they could find Dr. Emanuel. She saw bulges that she took to be guns in shoulder holsters inside their coats, and while they walked toward the elevator she quickly called the chief resident, a very proper British physician.

  The chief resident immediately recognized the danger, quickly located my father, and, with no time to spare, took him down a back stairway and out to the staff parking lot, where he stuffed him into his car. They raced to the train station, where the chief bought my father a ticket to Toronto, jabbed a few dollars into his shirt pocket, and watched him board a northbound train. Here was my father on a speeding train with only the clothes on his back and a few dollars in his pocket. As the train chugged northward my father, an Israeli, realized that he had no passport to show at the border to enter Canada.

  My father was not particularly handsome. As my mother described him to her parents, he looked liked he ran into a brick wall nose first and had slightly buck teeth. However, my father always has been attractive because of his energy, warmth, charm, and talent for finding some connection with people from all cultures and walks of life. He rarely observed social formalities and niceties—something he has passed on to his boys. He was prone to getting involved in various shenanigans, some of them quite dangerous. Characteristically he depended on his considerable charm and humor to get him out of jams. This adventure was no different. He struck up a conversation with a couple who were traveling back to their home in Rochester, New York. Once they heard about my father’s tale and current predicament, they invited the young doctor with the funny accent to stay with them. During that stay he tried twice to cross into Canada but was turned away both times.

  After two weeks spent hiding out in the couple’s Rochester home, my father returned to Cincinnati to discover that he was still a hunted man. The chief resident recommended a permanent move. My father went to the interns’ quarters, collected his belongings, and fled to Chicago. The move would be the most important one he ever made.

  In Chicago my father learned they needed pediatricians at Mount Sinai Hospital. Occupying more than a full city block and overlooking Douglas Park, Mount Sinai had been founded in 1919 to serve the Chicago Jewish community of North Lawndale at a time when that area was home to thousands of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, including my mother’s parents. It was also created to aid the training of Jewish doctors, who were excluded by the major university hospitals in the city. Interns and fellows at Mount Sinai followed the kind of demanding program you would have found at any American teaching hospital in that era, which is why Benjamin Emanuel was dead on his feet on a late night in October as he delivered a young patient to the X-ray department, which was near the emergency room.

  An attending physician believed the boy had a condition called intussusception, in which a portion of the intestine telescopes into another, interrupts blood flow, and can cause a life-threatening perforation. Benjamin was sure his boss was wrong, but what he thought did not matter. He handed the boy over to a tall, dark-haired radiology technician who listened to his request for films and then told him she wasn’t very busy and could develop the pictures for him. He went into the hallway, climbed onto one of the spare emergency room gurneys, and closed his eyes to get some rest.

  An hour passed as the X-rays were taken and developed. When she was finished, technician Marsha Smulevitz brought them out to show to the doctor, whom she found asleep on the gurney in the hallway. She playfully released the lock on the wheels of the gurney and let it roll down a ramp through the emergency room doors and into the cold night air. The young doctor awakened amused, not annoyed, and grinned as he pushed the gurney back to where it belonged.

  A quick scan of the images confirmed that the doctor who had sent him on this radiological errand was wrong. The boy did not have an intussusception. My father then considered the funny young woman who had brought the pictures and decided it would be a good idea to invite her for breakfast. That first breakfast lasted for hours and led to a game of pool in the residents’ lounge. At the time nurses and technicians were forbidden from entering this little haven for male physicians, but Ben Emanuel wasn’t much for observing such rules.

  Soon after, the couple had their first formal date, at an Italian restaurant called Papa Milano’s. In the days that followed, they spent every spare hour together. She told him about her family, growing up in Chicago, and her strong views on civil rights and equality. He told her about his brother Emanuel and his adventures around the world.

  Marsha was amused by Ben’s stories but more taken by his attitude. He loved medicine and had worked hard at becoming a good doctor, but he did not want to be treated like a god, which was a status too many people were happy to grant any physician in a white coat. Marsha was so impressed with this mensch that after just a few days she called her mother and said, “I think I met the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” Then, less than two weeks after the gurney ride, he asked her to marry him, and one day settle in Israel. She said yes even though, as she recalled, “I knew everyone would think we were crazy.”

  My mother’s parents, noting that Marsha’s older sister Esther was unmarried, said that tradition required a low-key event. Hoping to give the groom’s parents time to travel from Israel, they set a date ten months into the future. However, Ezekiel and Penina did not make the trip. Heeding her parents’ advice about avoiding a big show, Ben and Marsha paid for the rabbi and caterer themselves and were married on August 21, 1955, in my aunt Shirley’s apartment. By this time, my father was finished with his residency and ready to go into the world and make some money.

  A job offering $450 per month plus free room and board brought my parents to Elgin State Hospital, a sprawling old redbrick campus thirty miles west of Chicago, where more than a thousand psychiatric patients received little more than custodial care. Appalled by the conditions he found, my father began reviewing cases. He discovered that many of the patients had been improperly diagnosed and some had been committed on no basis other than that their families did not want them. He discharged as many of these patients as he could. He also helped a researcher who was conducting a study on the use of the stimulant Ritalin, with comatose patients. They found it could rouse some patients out of their torpor.

  When his one-year contract ended my father considered the hopelessness of the state mental health system and left Elgin for a chief residency in pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. With this training my father could have picked from a number of job offers, including one from a prominent St. Louis pediatrician that would have made him a partner in a prestigious private practice. But he thought about his mother living alone in Israel and decided it was time to return.

  Although my mother’s parents begged her to stay in America, she agreed to go to Israel. She and my father traveled by train to New York and then sailed to Naples, Italy. There they used some of the money they had saved while living at the mental institution in Elgin to buy a little Fiat 500 that traveled by ship with them to Israel and a new life.

  In 1957 Israel was an eight-year-old democracy with murderously hostile neighbors on three sides and a population that included roughly two million Jews and about eight hundred thousand Arabs.

  When they arrived in Tel Aviv, my parents found few comforts. Food, especially meat and eggs, was being rationed and apartments were so scarce that they had to crowd in with Penina. However, the country buzzed with an abundant sense of idealism and purpose. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom were displaced by the Holocaust and came with absolutely nothing, were busy creating a brand-new government, army, public institutions, and an entire economy. Entrepreneurs competed to serve an ever-growing demand for their goods and services while rural settlers established farms, orchards, and dairies. In this environment, people felt they were part of something momentous. They were.

  My mother loved everything about Israel, from the warmth of the Mediterranean climate to the variety of the people she encountered. She became ve
ry friendly with a family in her building, named Connor, who had fled Germany for Russia and eventually settled in Harbin, China. With the rise of Mao they had been forced to flee again, and wound up in Israel. One of the Connor daughters married a man who had also come to Israel from Harbin. He had made a fortune on pearls he had managed to smuggle out of China. Stories of pearl smuggling and narrow escapes were commonplace among the Jewish settlers. Indeed, everyone had endured so much hardship that it seemed silly to waste time on picayune differences. Friendships were formed quickly as everyone sought a sense of connection and community in this new place. Mrs. Connor welcomed both of my parents to visit her apartment whenever they needed anything. One day when my father popped in to say hello he found her cooking in nothing but her apron and her underwear. Her false teeth sat in a glass. Terribly self-conscious about her dentures, she immediately lifted the apron to cover her toothless mouth.

  The building was also home to a family named Yacoby, who were Kurdish Jews from Iraq and became my parents’ lifelong friends. Mr. Yacoby owned a jewelry store in nearby Jaffa, which became a trading center about five thousand years ago. In a place so ancient, one senses the mortal realities of our existence. Mr. Yacoby certainly seemed filled with a certain existential perspective. He often said that he would live only as long as his antique watch continued to tick. He did not know that at night his son slipped it off his wrist so he could keep it in good repair.

  Like Mr. Yacoby, many of our neighbors in Tel Aviv delighted my mother with their stories, insights, and warmth. When she wasn’t with them, she took long walks through quiet neighborhoods and along the Mediterranean shore, which was only a block away from our apartment on Mendele Street. Sometimes she went with friends to explore the countryside. On many afternoons she worked in the family drugstore. Pretty, friendly, and never prudish, she became the favorite of shy men who needed condoms.