Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  I was outraged, naturally, but as time passed I came to understand what I had gained from the experience. Where else could I learn, without more serious consequences, about the nuances of public conflict and the limits of sheer aggressiveness? Within the controlled environment of the competition, my excesses were indulged in ways that were instructive to me, and everyone else. In between matches Coach Sanders taught us how to let go of what happened the previous week and focus on the next challenge. We had a tendency to rehash our experiences, dwelling on mistakes made by the judges or the peaks and valleys of our own performances. Bill Sanders helped us learn from the past and then quickly turn to the future.

  Another formative academic experience was the Great Books seminar taught by a young English teacher named Raissa Landor. Her class on the great books of Western civilization was conducted as a seminar in a room where the desks were arranged in a circle. She refused to give us letter grades. Instead she wrote detailed evaluations for each of her students and offered suggestions for ways they could improve their reading, reasoning, and writing.

  Raissa encouraged us to read deeply and speak our minds about what we read. My classmates and I took her direction to heart. We were excited to compare Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America with the country we knew and determined to apply Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class to understand the local wealthy enclave of Indian Hill.

  I was also blessed to have great science teachers at New Trier. The best was Robert Koonz, who taught chemistry. He was a nervous type with a coughing tic. He assigned weekly, graded problem sheets and had a test every Friday. We always groaned about the constant work and testing, but you couldn’t help but learn the material. Koonz was always nervous about the unpredictability of lab experiments. He scrupulously insisted we take every precaution, such as goggles and rubber gloves. He had his hands full with my class. In our very first laboratory session he had us apply a little electricity to water in order to separate oxygen and hydrogen and collect the hydrogen to determine how much was created given the energy input. My partner Ray Agran and I promptly used a Bunsen burner to ignite the hydrogen, which caused a nice little Hindenburg-type explosion and sent glass from the flasks flying. After scurrying around the room in high anxiety, confirming that we were all safe and unhurt, Koonz flailed his arms into the air: “No more labs. Laboratory is canceled for the rest of the year.” Maybe this is why I didn’t become an experimental research scientist?

  Then, and now, Arnie would say that I was not as intellectually gifted as Brian or Ray Agran but I compensated by outworking them. He was right. On most school nights I spent at least three and a half hours—7 to 10:30 P.M.—on homework and never needed to be reminded about it. Ari and Rahm considered this monkish devotion to books quite strange, but it felt natural to me. While today this amount of nightly homework seems little for students from the best high schools, and is much less than what my own daughters spent, then it was what the best students at the best high schools devoted to their studies. It was also part of my response to the pressure my parents put on me to get top grades so I could be accepted at an elite college and then go to medical school. These expectations had been such a constant in my life that I had accepted them with little complaint. Indeed, I liked excelling at schoolwork, so the hours of studying were not onerous, the way practice is not burdensome for great high school sport stars.

  Bill Sanders listened sympathetically when I told him I was not sure I wanted to be a doctor. He also encouraged me to push for admission to my first-choice college, Amherst, even though my father preferred that I attend a college he had heard of like Harvard or Yale. My mother preferred that I stay in the city and go to the University of Chicago, which was close by and where the competitive intensity of the undergraduate program fit well with my personality. But I drew a thousand-mile circle around Chicago and determined I would go somewhere beyond that circle. With Sanders’s encouragement I zeroed in on Amherst, in part because one of the smartest New Trier students ever went there, and if it was good enough for him I figured it would be good enough for me. Plus, after having a high school class of nearly seven hundred kids, I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that I would prefer a smaller institution. I applied early-decision to Amherst, the only college I applied to. By December of my senior year I knew which college I was going to, which relieved a lot of the senior year tension.

  Sanders was also instrumental in getting me out of the only serious trouble I ever encountered at New Trier. After our college applications were complete and our first semester finals were over—and so the last grades the college would see were determined—three of us nerds, Brian, Arnie, and I, decided to celebrate by going to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a week of skiing. It was early February and we would miss a week at the start of the last semester of senior year. While missing classes might affect our final high school grades, it would have no impact on our college acceptance. Our parents considered us responsible and, more important, deserving of a special treat after long and successful school careers. We had a blast.

  Raissa Landor, Bill Sanders, and Robert Koonz were willing to indulge our truancy. However, our gym and calculus teachers did not find our absence amusing, or tolerable. They decided to flunk us and dismiss us from their classes. We could survive F’s in calculus, although we wanted the college credits that came with completing the course and scoring well on the AP tests. But, because we needed to complete four years of physical education for graduation, failing gym would actually prevent us from graduating from high school and thus would endanger college admissions. Sensing an opportunity to take some revenge on the haughty nerds, our gym teacher would not let us off easy. We were required to devote many hours to extra PE, which we did by playing endless doubles badminton in order to earn the credit. The calculus teacher, Walter Dodge, presented a more difficult challenge, and was of a mind to simply kick us out of the class.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t for nothing that Bill Sanders was the debate coach. He convened a nighttime conference at the school involving Mr. Dodge and our parents. Mr. Dodge admonished us that we were throwing away our chance to earn college credit, plus he was disappointed in us because we failed to live up to our role as the classroom’s leaders. After much heated discussion, we settled the matter by making a bet that we would earn 5’s—the top grade—on the AP test. If we did, we would be forgiven and receive credit. If we did not, he could fail us. Mr. Dodge accepted the wager. We won the bet, and thanks to Bill Sanders’s intercessions we were able to graduate and our records remained spotless.

  Besides the members of the debate team, Sanders paid special attention to the students in his advisory group, who were in his charge for their full four years at the high school. Before my brother Ari started his freshman year, our mother went to the school and negotiated for him to be placed in Bill Sanders’s advisory. The administration agreed to do it and Ari could not have been in better hands.

  Although he was every bit as intelligent as most of the kids in the top tracks, by the ninth grade Ari was probably two years behind grade level in reading comprehension and writing, and his grades showed it. Add a measure of hyperactivity and serious ADHD and you get a smart kid who is full of energy, difficult to engage, and thoroughly frustrated. Knowing what it felt like to be unfairly judged, he looked for opportunities to stand up for people who were being bullied.

  It did not take much to provoke Ari, because, to be blunt, he liked to fight. He relished the way that once the battle started all the distractions and diversions that normally bothered him melted away and he could focus on a single simple and obvious task: winning the fight. He also craved the feeling of certainty that comes when you are the good guy fighting a bad guy, doing something as primal as trading blows, until one side has had enough. He actually felt calmer inside when doing battle.

  Ari was so good in physically stressful situations because, like most people with ADHD, the chemicals that tend to make other people more hyper actua
lly made him feel focused and relaxed. The speed, danger, and risk that make other people nervous make guys like Ari serene.

  The paradoxical effect of stimulation on people with ADHD explains, in part, why Ari put so much effort into provoking people. He was bored and if he could get someone to chase him around the house, he loved it. Decades later Rahm’s friend Darcy Goldfarb, who was his ballet partner, would recall quite vividly how she would arrive in her orange Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible to take Rahm to the dance studio only to discover mayhem had broken out.

  “One day Rahm came out with this grin on his face and said, ‘We can’t go yet.’ I kept saying, ‘Why? Why?’ Finally Rahm said, ‘We can’t go because I have Ari tied up in the closet.’ We went inside and Ari was locked in a closet and pounding on the door and screaming. Ari would just bait Rahm until he couldn’t stand it and then all hell would break loose. But every time it happened Ari looked happy.”

  With parents who were determined to help him, Ari was one of the first kids in America to take the drug Ritalin for hyperactivity. The drug’s usefulness in treating this disorder was discovered in the 1960s and it was introduced gradually in the 1970s. (I would one day study under one of the Ritalin pioneers, Leon Eisenberg, who would become a professor at Harvard Medical School.) Although the drug would be a subject of much controversy, it worked for Ari, making him more focused, and less combative in school. Ari also got lots of help from school staff, especially Bill Sanders, who was invited to attend a few meetings at school where the agenda was: What do we do with Ari Emanuel?

  As Bill would recall, the school psychologist and administrators were concerned about Ari’s behavior and performance but unsure about how to address it. Bill pushed for him to be enrolled in a special education program inside the high school where he would be treated as a regular kid who needed a particular kind of teaching. He came to our house, where my parents agreed on this tack. Days later Ari met for the first time with New Trier West’s first specialist in learning disabilities, a young teacher named Merle Giblichman.

  “Gibby,” as she was called, had just three years of teaching experience when Ari arrived in her special education classroom. Her long brown hair made her look even younger than her age. Indeed, she could have passed for a New Trier student. Since she had grown up in Wilmette and had gone through the local school system, she knew that New Trier could be a challenging place for anyone who could not keep up academically. In this environment, anyone in special ed would feel tortured by the stigma of needing extra help. For Ari, who came from a home where reading and scholarship were held in high regard, this was doubly true.

  In Gibby’s room, Ari got one-on-one tutoring and a quiet place free of distractions where he could work on assignments and take tests under rules that gave him more time and credit for showing he grasped the content of a lesson even if he had trouble writing out his answers to questions. The work was not easy. Letters and whole words would get jumbled between the page and his brain and Ari found it difficult to admit when he stumbled over material that was easy for others. He would pound the desk with his fist and kick the walls in frustration.

  Fortunately, Gibby did not care much if you banged around and groaned in misery as long as you did not give up. Her students could call a time-out to stretch and walk around if they needed to shake off some stress and they got extra time to go back and check their answers or essays. These accommodations, which today are standard in schools across America, were almost unique to New Trier West in the 1970s. At that time, disabilities like dyslexia were little understood and only the best-read specialists used the kind of techniques Gibby deployed to help students overcome them.

  Gradually, Ari made progress and gained confidence. When he heard that Gibby had taught French while getting a master’s degree in special education he pestered her to give him language lessons. She acquiesced, but only as a reward for his hard work. She also became his advocate. Once, when an enraged Ari leaped off the mat at a wrestling tournament and attacked the referee, Gibby defended him to the faculty and administration. He was allowed to stay on the team and eventually became a top wrestler at New Trier West. In his senior year Ari seemed destined for a shot at becoming state champion in his weight class, but a broken arm suffered at the start of the season kept him out of competition for the year.

  Missing his chance to become a champion was a big disappointment for Ari, but he channeled his time and energy into college preparatory courses that Gibby helped him access. She also put up with Ari’s anger and subversive activities, which included stealing his own file, which held test results and evaluations from learning specialists. Gibby got it back and actually saw something to admire in his determination.

  Like Bill Sanders, Gibby made friends with my parents, who supported every demand she made on their son because they knew she was trying to help him get in shape for college and life beyond. When the teachers’ union went on strike my mother joined them on the picket line and when Gibby needed to consult her, my mother invited her to the house for dinner.

  Considering what she heard at our house, Gibby knew the Emanuels were highly engaged in political and intellectual issues. So she was a little surprised when Ari revealed his career goal to her during a quiet moment in her classroom. “Gibby,” he said, “I want to make a lot of money.” He did not know exactly how he was going to do it, or what he might use the money to accomplish. But he was certain that he wanted a fortune.

  At a school in the 1970s where the faculty preached idealism and social responsibility, no one else would have been so bold about his desire to be rich. You might privately harbor fantasies of wealth, and certainly there was plenty of money in many of the families who lived in our district. But expressing the desire to be rich was so gauche that Gibby suspected Ari was just trying to be outrageous. He wasn’t. In fact, no one in the family was surprised by Ari’s ambition. There were plenty of early warning signs.

  From the moment he sold that first slice of cheesecake for a tidy profit, my brother was entranced by the capitalist system. The fact that you could make money by outhustling the other guy and by delivering a better product or service more efficiently than the other guy resonated with Ari at a young age. Ari recognized that there were many ways to work this system without having to rely on reading or writing. He was charming, energetic, creative, persistent, and indefatigable. These qualities would be more than enough to get him to the top of almost any business.

  For practice, Ari would try lots of businesses on for size, even before he was finished with public school. Like a lot of kids in the suburbs he did lawn mowing and cleanups. But unlike the others, he organized his brothers, friends, and neighbors into crews. Paid $5 to cut the grass on a typical quarter-acre plot, he distributed $3 to the boys who did the work and pocketed $2. When he was older he joined his friends Lowell Kraff and Nate Fineburg in a venture selling T-shirts at rock concerts all over the Midwest. Lowell, who lived a block away, had been Ari’s friend since fourth grade. As Lowell would recall, it was at about that time that he made owning a gold Rolex one of his life’s goals. His father was a highly successful eye surgeon who made a million dollars a year and drove a Ferrari. Nate, who was Lowell’s cousin, became Ari’s friend in junior high. Nate would notice that Ari was more driven to succeed than anyone Nate knew.

  “He would be up at dawn, honking the car horn outside my house for me to get up and go to work,” Nate told me. “If I did not come out he’d come inside and slap me and drag me out of bed,” all the while goading Nate in a high-pitched voice. On one level, Nate considered Ari’s aggression obnoxious and annoying. On another, he felt entertained by it. “You never knew if Ari the jerk or Ari the nice guy would show up. But somehow I learned to love all of him, including the slaps and the pinches.”

  Working with as many as a dozen other kids, Lowell, Nate, and Ari bought knockoff T-shirts decorated like the ones sold at concerts for bands like Cheap Trick, the Rolling Stones, and the Doobie Brothers. The
y would show up outside the theaters and arenas when the bands were playing and in the half hour or so that it took for people to leave a concert sell hundreds of shirts. The trick was to get in and get out before being noticed by anyone working for the band, because they would use force to stop the sale of unauthorized merchandise.

  Nate, Lowell, and Ari worked many weekends selling shirts. As time passed, they improved their technique. When their inventory got out of whack and they had too many “smalls” and not enough “mediums” they ripped the labels out and sold them “as is.” When a heavy rainstorm started at one outdoor concert Lowell ran to a store, bought hundreds of plastic garbage bags, and sold them as “raincoats” for two dollars apiece.

  Of course, it was not all profit and creative problem solving. The T-shirt crew was often chased away from concert sites and they were arrested, more than once, on charges like peddling without a license. In every case, they were detained and released when charges were dropped. Never once did they consider giving up the business. But they did try a few variations. One year they sold big framed photographs that they loaded into the Emanuel family station wagon and hauled all over the Midwest to big office buildings. As Nate would recall:

  We’d go into a building and tell the people in whatever offices were there that we had been delivering pictures to the guys down the hall and had some left over. Before you knew it we’d be in the conference room setting these things up—they were landscapes mostly, and skylines of big cities—and people would buy them to put on the walls or take home. We got ’em for twenty dollars and sold ’em for forty-five dollars. There were some days when we would get kicked out of places and never sell a picture. But there were other days when we would clean up. At night we would stay out until two in the morning but then Ari would be back at my house at seven, ready to go again.