Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  “I guess,” he blurted, “that makes Mommy the god-ass!”

  When you come from a family that is temperamentally outspoken and viscerally antagonistic to power, you carry a kind of injustice radar with you at all times. This device, which is always switched on, detects arrogance and the abuse of power with exquisite precision. You then have the choice to act or acquiesce. I faced this choice in third-grade gym class with Mr. Kerr.

  Physical education for boys at Anshe Emet was everything you would imagine in a gym class of the 1960s. Think skinny eight-year-olds—some hyperactive, some with undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, many woefully uncoordinated—playing dodgeball, tumbling on mats, and climbing ropes under the punishing gaze of a thirtyish male teacher dressed in a T-shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers.

  No doubt Mr. Kerr had his hands full with my class. Some of us may have had minimal athletic ability, but we were really talented at talking and arguing. With our many questions, opinions, and suggestions we could drive any gym teacher crazy. Nevertheless, he should have known better than to draw the line he did one winter morning when the chattering and disorder got the best of him.

  “All right!” he screamed. “Everyone line up! Now!”

  I cannot recall now whether we had been treating our gym teacher with any extra disrespect on that day but he launched into a tirade that ended with the kind of question that reveals a commander who is afraid that he is losing his grip.

  “From now on everyone is going to call me ‘sir’ at all times. Got that?”

  Mr. Kerr paused for what seemed like ages, then asked, “Does anyone disagree with this? If you do, then step forward across this line.”

  Granted, this was elementary school, not the USS Caine, and Mr. Kerr wasn’t Captain Queeg. But it was the third-grade equivalent of a moral showdown. Without hesitation I stepped forward and across the line.

  I am not sure anyone noticed me at first. When he finally did, Mr. Kerr had to ask me if I had stepped out of line on purpose. I told him yes, and explained that the respect that comes with the title “sir” is something you earn. And by demanding it, he had shown himself to be someone who did not deserve it.

  “Go to Mr. Reisman’s office. Now.”

  Like all good private school principals, Morton Reisman was one part educator, one part administrator, and one part diplomat. A tall, balding, bespectacled man, he wore a tailored suit and tie to work every day. He knew the name of every child in the school and was so versatile and intelligent that he could serve as a substitute teacher for any class, including Hebrew. Sometimes, when he was under stress, he suffered from facial tics. He would suddenly twitch two or three times in the middle of speaking. He was so respected—loved, really—that no one seemed to notice or said a word about it.

  When I arrived at the school office I explained what had happened and was told to wait while my mother was called. She walked the blocks to school in what seemed like just a few minutes and, after stopping to reassure me, went right into Mr. Reisman’s office. When I was finally escorted into the office I could see that she and my principal were getting along just fine. They asked me to explain again what had happened and I did, doing my best to articulate my belief that respect can be earned, but never commanded.

  My mother said she had raised me to hold this belief and that she agreed with me. Mr. Reisman studied us both and saw that we meant what we said. He then said he would handle it and told me to return to my classroom. I was never punished. In fact, at home I was praised for standing up to a bully. I never found out what happened between the principal and the gym teacher, but Mr. Kerr left Anshe Emet a few years later.

  At the time, I didn’t know that many other parents would have handled my showdown with Mr. Kerr quite differently. More than a few would have sided with any adult who held authority, no matter what, in order to teach a child to be a law-abiding citizen. When these parents are called to school by the principal they begin by asking their kid, “What did you do wrong?”

  My mother practiced what she preached when it came to equality and justice and that meant that we were innocent until proven guilty. She also trusted us, especially when we were little and more or less guileless, to be honest with her. If I said that Mr. Kerr was impatient and disrespectful, she believed me. If we stood up for ourselves, she supported us.

  This high level of trust was balanced with responsibilities. The most important one, in my case, involved getting my brothers home from school safely. Because my mother did not drive we used city buses to get back and forth. I started going home alone when I was in first grade, and Rahm was all of four and enrolled in nursery school.

  At the end of school, I met my brother and led him outside to the sidewalk, where we turned north on Pine Grove Street. We then navigated Chicago’s traffic, crossing Sheridan Road, one of the busier four-lane streets in the city, until we arrived at a sign marking a stop on the 151 and 153 Chicago Transit Authority routes. Eventually a bus would glide to a halt and the driver would open the door. I’d boost Rahm up the steps of the bus and deposit the fare—eighteen cents for the two of us—in the box. If there were seats available we would take them, but sometimes the bus was so packed we had to stand and hold on to one of the steel poles. Fortunately, the ride to the stop around the corner from our apartment took only a few minutes.

  Looking back from the perspective of a twenty-first-century father, it’s hard to believe that allowing kids so young to cross busy city streets and travel alone on public transportation did not constitute parental neglect or child endangerment. Of course, those were different times, and as I recall I never complained or said I was anxious about the responsibility. Perhaps this was because I had figured out a way to profit from the arrangement. My unwitting co-conspirator was the mother of my classmate Michelle Lowe. Mrs. Lowe had a car, which she used to ferry Michelle back and forth to Anshe Emet from their home. On rainy days, or if she just took pity on us, Mrs. Lowe would offer us a ride home, which was a few blocks farther north than the Lowes’ apartment. We always eagerly accepted. I would keep the unspent bus fare. I got Rahm to keep quiet by promising to spend the money with him.

  The scheme worked until the day that Mrs. Lowe encountered my mother at some parent-teacher event. She asked, with a hint of irritation, why my mom had never thanked her for the occasional cab service she provided for the Emanuel family. After my mother and Mrs. Lowe figured out what had happened, and stopped laughing over my ingenuity, I was confronted about the pennies, nickels, and dimes I had taken. When my mother demanded their return I explained that it was “used car fare” and Rahm and I had already spent nearly all of it on candy or used books.

  To their credit, my brothers behaved well enough that we made the trip to school and back hundreds of times without incident. They were not so accommodating at home. Whether we were arguing over who got to pick a TV show or who won at Risk, Monopoly, or some other board game, we shed blood almost every day. More often than not the battle line was drawn between me and the other two, who banded together out of shared resentment for a stronger big brother. I may have protected them at school or around the neighborhood but at home the competition between us was intense. As the eldest in this survival-of-the-fittest environment I benefited from being bigger and stronger. Though younger, Ari quickly grew to be taller than Rahm, which put Rahm in the awkward position of being outmuscled by the baby of the family.

  My best friend during the Anshe Emet years was a boy named Skippy Shein. Compared to us, the Sheins were the Rockefellers. They lived in a four-story town house located a block north of Oak Street, which is Chicago’s version of Madison Avenue. They gave their only child the best of everything and he always seemed to have plenty of money in his pockets. His parents ran a family business from the basement of their house, which meant they were often too busy to watch us closely. We got into plenty of mischief. Once we collected a bunch of the nitroglycerin pills that Skippy’s father Max took for a heart condition and spent the af
ternoon smashing them in the misinformed hope that we could cause an explosion. Early one Saturday morning Skippy suggested we get breakfast at a little restaurant on Oak Street called Eli’s, where his father kept a tab with the manager. When the waitress asked us what we wanted, we ordered one of almost everything on the breakfast menu—French toast, pancakes, omelets, bagels, two big orange juices, bacon, sausage, muffins. The plates arrived and we nibbled a bit from each one, then the bill arrived. It was something like eleven dollars—a fortune for us. Skippy told them to put it on his father’s account. When Max Shein got the bill, he hit the roof. After yelling at us about our misplaced sense of entitlement, he required us to do yard work in order to pay our debt. Our hands were blistered by the rakes and clippers we used but we learned a lesson about those magical words, “Put it on the tab.”

  Although sometimes I paid a price, the freedom that let me get into trouble with Skippy Shein was a gift from my parents. I also benefited from their somewhat unconventional views on chores and allowance. My parents never established a routine that required us to perform specific chores in exchange for their approval or an allowance. Instead they heard out our requests for money and if they thought a purchase made sense—and we were keeping up with school—they gave us the cash. This was always an easy bargain for me, but not necessarily for my brothers.

  Rahm did well enough in school, but he always heard from teachers that they expected the same straight-A performance they got from me. Though fiercely intelligent, especially when it came to sizing people up and assessing a social situation, Rahm was not naturally inclined to sit at a desk and put in extra effort to turn a B into an A. As my father often said, without noting that the phrase applied to himself at that same age, “Rahm always tries to get the maximum for the minimum.” As if it is genetically wired, Rahm’s son seems to have the same view of grades, which, of course, drives Rahm as a parent as mad as it did my father.

  The fact was, Rahm was not interested in becoming a copy of his older brother. When teachers mentioned my grades or our parents posted our report cards on the refrigerator, he was neither envious nor motivated to match me. Instead, he resented being compared and became determined to find a way to succeed on his own terms. In the meantime he would do whatever was necessary to get under my skin as often as possible.

  On many nights, Rahm got his revenge by lying in bed and whistling a long, complicated melody while keeping time by snapping his fingers. Since I could neither whistle nor snap my fingers, this little show was a good way to annoy me. When we lived on Buena Avenue, and he bunked over me, I would try to stop him by kicking his mattress from below so hard he had to hang on like a cowboy on a bronco to keep from being thrown onto the floor. When we lived on Winona and he shared the bunk beds with Ari, who laughed as Rahm trilled away, I’d bomb him with pillows or wrestle him to the floor to get him to stop.

  Ari seemed to be born unafraid of competition and conflict, especially physical battle. Sympathetic to the underdog, he usually took Rahm’s side when the fight became physical and as he quickly grew to be bigger and stronger, their little team became quite powerful. More than anything, Ari seemed to enjoy inciting us whenever things got too quiet. With mischief in his eyes and a grin on his face, Ari would needle and annoy until someone lashed out. The instant you moved to swat him, he would dash off so quickly that it was almost impossible to catch him. All the while Ari would laugh with excitement because he had made something happen.

  Inside the family, Ari’s modus operandi fell squarely in the range of normal. We all liked to test and challenge and any hard feelings that arose during our fights faded faster than the bruises. He was also accepted by the Glass brothers and other friends in the neighborhood because of his fearlessness. But when he got to school, his restlessness became a problem. Ari was highly verbal, incredibly alert—he had a great memory and learned certain things very quickly—and very charming, yet when it came to reading and writing, he ran into a wall.

  While other kids wrote out letters, Ari struggled to translate what he saw on the blackboard to the paper on his desk. He wrote individual letters backward and reversed the order of letters in words. Dog became bog and boy became yod. Born into a home filled with books, and now settled into a school where scholarship equaled success, Ari fell further and further behind his brothers and his classmates. Worse, he had trouble sitting still long enough to complete a lesson, and it was practically impossible for him to spend extra time studying. He had too much energy, and was too easily distracted.

  Today, a boy like Ari would be diagnosed with dyslexia and would be given help from specially trained teachers, extra time to complete assignments, and a way to think about himself that would spare him from feeling like a failure. In the mid-1960s, dyslexia and attention deficit disorder were just beginning to gain attention among physicians and educators. Like most kids with learning difficulties, Ari was lectured and given extra drills in the belief that he just needed to pay attention and practice a little more. In the eyes of the adults charged with his education, Ari’s problem wasn’t developmental or neurological. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, they seemed to think that his problem was a lack of effort.

  Ari could not make others understand that he was trying as hard as he could. Nor could he explain that to him, the letters and words he wrote on his paper matched what he saw on the blackboard or in his workbook assignments. Eventually he began to fear that his inability to read was caused by a character defect or a basic lack of intelligence. He did not share these feelings openly. In fact, he buried them so deeply that they only came out in bursts of aggression or anger. He argued and got into fights that showed he was upset, but Ari never explained his motives. Then, in an unexpected moment, the truth would bubble to the surface.

  One day, he and my mother walked to the park with our dog Andele. It was the end of August and Ari, age seven, was thinking about the school year that lay ahead. As they walked he searched the ground for sticks that he then threw for the dog to fetch. “Look, Mommy!” he shouted as he wound up and threw a stick so far that it landed beyond the glow of the streetlight.

  “Wow, Ari, you’ve got quite an arm,” said my mother.

  “Yeah,” he replied, “I can throw but I still can’t read.”

  Other kids had mastered reading and writing simple sentences, complete with proper punctuation, while Ari was still struggling to transcribe single letters properly. The humiliation he experienced every time he was called on to read aloud was so unbearable that even during the summer break, he was thinking about the failure that awaited him in September as adults again demanded that he “buckle down” and try harder. All his effort produced no real gain.

  My mother understood Ari’s predicament and tried to compensate by giving him extra attention when he did homework. She also pressed him by making sure he understood that he was expected to give it his best whenever he did anything. On his own, Ari would look for different ways to show his intelligence and talent. He became highly skilled at social relationships and adept at both charming and manipulating adults. Not surprisingly, his methods were least effective at home, where my parents understood Ari’s techniques and generally refused to be charmed. When it came to measuring both our effort and our achievement, they maintained very high standards. It was a tough kind of love, and Ari often resented it.

  Decades later, it would not take much prodding to get Ari to recall the burning sense of shame he felt as he tried to overcome his problem in full view of his classmates and brothers. “Do you have any idea what kind of torture it was like to sit there every day?” he would ask Rahm and me. “It was hard enough for me to sit still, and even if I could do that it was almost impossible for me to do what the teachers expected.”

  In fact, Rahm and I did know something of what Ari felt. As brothers we may have teased and tortured him on other matters but we did not try to embarrass him when it came to reading and writing. Ari’s struggles were so painful to him that w
e would have been especially cruel to torment him about it. Also, he was a tough little guy, which meant that he could respond to our teasing with the kind of physical attack that more than paid you back for whatever psychic pain you might inflict on him. Fundamentally, though, it was easy for us to understand how it felt to be on the hot seat, sensing the pressure of our mother’s expectations and fearing that you might not measure up.

  This was the downside of life as a child of purposeful parents. Sometimes all the focus and devotion my mother gave us veered into the realm of excessive pressure. This was certainly true where Ari and reading were concerned. Rahm and I pitied him for the amount of attention he received as my mothered tried, sometimes with nothing more than demands and the force of will, to help him overcome his disability. But as we all would discover, lots of kids would have given anything to be part of a family where they received so much attention, even if it was sometimes hard to take.

  Six

  A FAMILY, EXTENDED

  In 1965, Jeffrey Wacker was a soft, pudgy, pale boy of about six who knew the batting averages for every player on the Chicago Cubs but was so uncoordinated he had trouble tossing a ball across the alley in a way that gave you any chance of catching it. On any given day, he would miss at least one loop as he put on his belt, and his zipper was as likely to be open as it was to be closed, but you might not notice because his shirt was untucked and hanging down to his knees.

  We met Jeffrey when his parents brought him to a service we attended at the famous Unity Temple in Oak Park. A center of support for the civil rights movement, this Unitarian church was a place where people of every type of belief or nonbelief came together for services and support. A Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, the building is a modern version of a Greek temple, with thick concrete columns and a series of flat roofs. Filled with light, the interior is both inspiring and peaceful.