Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  For me, Rahm’s hospitalization was both frightening and fascinating. I visited every day on my way home from a summer job as a research assistant in a laboratory at Michael Reese Hospital on the Near South Side. By the time Rahm was out of the extreme danger zone and intensive care unit, I would bring him a special onion soup he loved from a restaurant near the hospital; we would lie in bed together watching TV and just talking about the attractive nurses. I also recall being impressed by the way a small injury—a cut finger—could quickly bloom into a life-threatening illness. Although no one mentioned it at the time, it was just this process, infection from a small superficial wound, that had killed our father’s brother Emanuel back in Israel.

  Finally, Rahm was able to leave the hospital after a total of more than six weeks. This would give him less than a month to gain back some of the weight he lost, and hang out with me and Ari, who had returned from Israel.

  Fourteen

  COLLEGE BOYS

  By the time Rahm got to Sarah Lawrence, I was already two years into my education at Amherst. No one on my mother’s side of the family had ever gone away to a four-year college. Although my father had studied in Europe, his experience wasn’t remotely similar to what an undergrad encountered in the United States in the mid-1970s. At Lausanne he had followed a program that called for lots of independent study, with only three final exams in six years of medical school, and absolutely no campus-style social life. I would be the first in the family to attempt the adjustment to an institutional subculture of dormitories, dining halls, and tradition, which, until recently, had offered precious few opportunities to Jews.

  I arrived at Amherst with unreasonable expectations. Given its exclusivity, small size, and reputation for academic excellence, I hoped I would find a bigger version of my New Trier West peer group. In my imagination, most Amherst students would share my rabid devotion to competitive studying, intellectual jousting, and debate about big ideas. I also hoped that extracurricular life would revolve, at least partly, around politics and protest. This was what college looked like to me, through the lens of the media and from my experience on the barricades at Northwestern. This expectation only grew when I heard that the president of Amherst had participated in an antiwar sit-in at nearby Westover Air Force Base and campaigned for women to be admitted to the school. This information reinforced my hope that I would find plenty of like-minded folks who would be excited to talk into the night about democracy in America, affirmative action, and a hundred other topics.

  Instead I found lots of really smart students who worked very hard but also devoted themselves with equal intensity to parties, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Ridiculously, I had not fully thought through that I would be in the last entering all-male class, thus within the residual atmosphere of an all-male college. Although a few dozen, mainly older, women transfer students could be seen on campus my first year, female freshmen would only be admitted the next year, and true equality for women at Amherst was still years away. As a result, the college remained a haven for those chauvinists who refused to see women as little more than sex objects and it permitted a level of alcohol consumption that approached both the medical and social definition of poisonous. These elements of campus life were a big disappointment for a kid hoping for an academic utopia where we studied big ideas of every sort and then applied them to life in the outside world through writing, activism, and even public protest.

  Of course, when I left home I did not realize that the intense and engaging environment I experienced among an elite group of students at New Trier West and hoped to find at Amherst did not exist there, or at any other college in America in the fall of 1975. According to The New York Times, a “puzzling calm” had settled on campuses from coast to coast. While students had not returned to raccoon coats and goldfish swallowing, they seemed nervous and inclined to look for comfort in the status quo. They were also affected by the Arab oil embargo and economic recession that made the mid-1970s an anxious time for anyone concerned about jobs and the future of the economy. Fraternities were reasserting their grip on social life and nerdy, bigmouthed, politically obsessed students like me, who may have enjoyed a brief moment in the sixties when they were respected and even admired, were pushed back to the fringe.

  Not surprisingly, I began many relationships at Amherst with arguments. I considered this perfectly normal. Indeed, for me it was a sign of respect. As it turned out, hardly anyone else felt the same way. As Andy Oram, one of my closest friends from college, recalls, “I heard Zeke before I first met him.”

  I was coming back from a class or something and I heard arguing coming from our friend Mark Berger’s room down the hall. In this high squeaky voice this guy is saying, “You’re wrong. You’re wrong and you know it!” I ducked my head into the room to see what’s going on and this kid, Zeke Emanuel, is arguing about something like his life depended on it. I loved arguing, too, and it never bothered me. But I was one of the few who got it. With other people it inspired a lot of dislike.

  Dislike is a kind way of saying it. In fact, I inspired the kind of feeling that moved others to set fire to my dorm room door and ring my phone at all hours of the night. A fair amount of this hostility was, no doubt, aroused by my sharp-elbow personality. Some came because I was a threat to the get-along attitude that necessarily pervades a small institution. And some came as a reaction to the high scores I posted in pre-med science courses like introductory chemistry, which seriously skewed the grading curve. As Andy Oram recalled it, I was the student who made it harder for others to get A’s. In my mind, we were scholars on equal footing. But they were worried about making the grades required to earn a diploma and get admitted to medical school. I found chemistry and all science classes easy. Many of them struggled. They deserved my empathy and understanding. I needed help grasping this fact.

  “Zeke, no one else thinks this way. This is why half the people in the college don’t like you. They think you’re loud, aggressive, and obnoxious. And they’re right.”

  It was about 3 A.M. and Andy and I were speeding along Interstate 90 in his ’65 Plymouth Valiant, somewhere in the vast space between Albany and Buffalo, bound for the Oram homestead in the little city of Jamestown, New York. Jamestown is just twenty miles from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, which makes the drive from Amherst about eight hours. This was just enough time for Andy to begin explaining what was wrong with me.

  If you do it right, your first experience living in the adult world far from family and childhood friends forces you to see yourself in a new light. This does not happen without pain and suffering. (Once I realized it, I told my daughters as they were leaving for college that the most important part of their college experience would entail “suffering,” that they would learn the most because of the moments of existential suffering they experienced. Of course, they didn’t believe me, especially because their first few years were largely welcoming and pleasant experiences. But they all got the “suffering” part and were the better for it.)

  When I think back on how unhappy I was in my first two years at Amherst, I have to conclude that the transformation is ever more painful the longer and more fiercely you resist it. As an Emanuel, I resisted with instinctive, defensive intensity. Who was Andy Oram to say that my way of doing things was wrong? As far as I was concerned, the problem at Amherst was not me, but the other students—their conventionality and unwillingness to ask the “big questions” of life.

  “These are privileged people in an extremely privileged place,” I told Andy. I, on the other hand, could not afford to go home to Chicago for Thanksgiving and never even ordered a pizza on a weekend. “Most of them come from rich families that gave them everything and now they have the opportunity to get the greatest, most intense education available in the country. And what do they do? These fuckheads waste their time drinking until they puke. Then wait until the last minute to write their papers and don’t do the reading before class.”

  Fortunately for me, Andy assumed
I spoke with the best of intentions, and he was such a good friend that he would listen and argue all the way from Amherst to Jamestown and never run out of patience—often laughing at my own narrow naïveté. When we finally reached Jamestown I discovered that his family was far more reserved and genteel than mine. Andy and I wore ties for dinner with his mother, who was a widow. But while they were polite, the Orams were also a feisty group and their conversation sparkled with ideas even while it was more mannered than an Emanuel dinner. It was a revelation, to me, to see how a family might enjoy the thrust and parry of debate without raised voices and four-letter words.

  When Andy came to my house I was able to see, through his reactions, how life on Locust Road might seem to someone with fresh eyes. In the loud and warm reception we received upon arrival, Andy was taken by my mother’s generous hugs and startled to hear everyone at the house call me Jon or Jonny instead of Zeke.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Andy got the full Emanuel treatment. As he would later recall:

  I had never heard anyone swear or tell an off-color story at the table and in the first five minutes at breakfast Rahm must have said “fuck” five times. Ari and Zeke punched the shit out of each other’s shoulders and their dad told this wild story—a long dirty joke, really—about two kids growing up in Israel who wanted another brother.

  I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. It wasn’t just because it was funny. It’s because it was a really gross story, sexual, and crazy, told in this very matter-of-fact way, at the breakfast table with Zeke’s mother and me, this guy they don’t even know. That would never have happened at my house but at the Emanuel house it was just normal.

  Like just about everyone, Andy was charmed by my father’s warm, open, and easygoing personality. My mother, on the other hand, made Andy feel a little bit anxious and on guard. “She always seemed a tiny bit dangerous,” he remembered. “There was a certain edge that made you feel like she would say something hurtful and not let someone’s pain get in the way of her own need to make a point.”

  Exhibit A in Andy’s critique came after he had known the family for a long time, and my mother, in a careless moment, said something about how he would always be an outsider. According to him, she said, “We love you, honey, but we don’t need you.” Since Andy was not quite family the statement was true. His point, of course, was that she still didn’t have to say it.

  In truth, both my parents pushed until you pushed back. For example, the doctor issue. As a youngster I accepted their plan for me to become a doctor, but by the end of high school I had doubts. While I was really good in science, and throughout my high school and college career had never earned anything other than an A in a science course—except first-semester organic chemistry—I had begun doing medical research in laboratories over the summers. The work was interesting, but once I understood the underlying science, I became somewhat bored. All the effort to discover one little piece of a puzzle did not seem worth it. I never liked the process of doing the experiments, and so the notion of becoming a research physician seemed less and less appealing. As a consequence, I began trying to imagine other possible careers. I tried to express my feelings, but my parents did not take them very seriously. They continued to ignore my view, dismissing it as born of insufficient experience. The way they talked about my being a doctor, it was as if I had no choice.

  My doubts about medicine reached one peak at the end of my junior year in college when I went home and the three of us went out for dinner at a popular burger place in nearby Northbrook. I tried to tell them that while I found my science classes compelling, I didn’t enjoy lab work at all and I could not imagine taking care of patients day in and day out the way my father did. My father delighted in the interaction with people and solving individual patients’ problems; I took after my mom and thought about solving people’s problems by changing social policies. I was much more intrigued by political theory and political change. I also told them that I was becoming more intrigued by studying and writing about politics, philosophy, and economics. I lacked a clearly formulated alternative to being a doctor. My thinking was pretty vague. Maybe, I ventured, I should start a political magazine or become a political philosopher. These half-baked possibilities were quickly quashed. My parents saw only that I got good grades in pre-med classes and stressed that as a physician I would be well respected and enjoy a good and reliable income, which certainly wasn’t likely as a founder of an obscure magazine, they emphasized to me.

  Sensing that I might not be satisfied with a life like his, my father said I could combine clinical practice and serious research. “So what if you don’t like doing the lab work?” he said. “In a few years you’ll have students and fellows to do the work. You’ll be the boss.”

  For once, I didn’t have the words to argue with my father. However, while I enjoyed learning about science, I knew I didn’t enjoy lab work, even though I was reasonably good at it. I felt a vague sense that while I could not clearly articulate it, I was missing out on something that really appealed to me. I saw the irony that I was easily sailing forward on the pre-med track yet having the persistent gnawing sense that it wasn’t right for me, while many of my classmates who truly wanted to be practicing doctors—and would be really good at it—were getting grades that would force them to contemplate other careers. Back at school I continued doing the pre-med track, while also continuing my studies in philosophy and political science. Always a loyal friend, Andy listened to me describe what happened that night in the restaurant and was not at all equivocal in his assessment. He said my parents “were trying to live through their kids too much” and were ignoring my own drives and aspirations. While he did not have an alternative career to suggest to me—after all, it wasn’t his role, and because he wasn’t sure what he wanted, he was planning to take a year off between his junior and senior years—but he did encourage me to stick to my own feelings. The tendency to push forward until someone screams out in painful resistance was one of the negative aspects of the Emanuel way, he said.

  I could understand Andy’s point, but it would take more than a good friendship to force me to confront some of the negative aspects of being an Emanuel. For that to happen, I would need to fall in love, marry, and have my own children.

  Love and marriage and children were not something our parents pushed on us. Instead they showed us through their example that finding the right person, making a commitment, and having kids can make life more fulfilling and make us into better individuals. However, they clearly communicated to us boys that there was no need to hurry the process, and in the meantime there was no reason to deny oneself life’s pleasures, just as long as you were responsible. That’s why, in high school, Ari expressed true shock when Gibby told him a classmate was pregnant. “What’s the matter with them?” she recalled my brother saying. “Haven’t they ever heard of condoms?”

  Ari would never be shy about sex, and as the most handsome and charming of us all, he would have an adventuresome single life. Eventually he would meet and fall in love with Sarah Addington, whom he later married, in 1996, when he was thirty-four years old and was becoming a successful agent. Rahm would follow a similar path, holding off on love and marriage until he met Amy Rule in 1990. They married in 1994, when Rahm was also thirty-four and well ensconced in the White House. In marrying late, both of my brothers followed my father’s example. He insisted that it was best to complete your education and establish yourself firmly in a career before considering marriage and children. Love can wait.

  Considering the fact that I was the brother who was truly tone-deaf when it came to women, it was a bit of a surprise—even to me—when I turned out to be the one who took a romantic detour from Ben Emanuel’s route to an early marriage. Certainly my college friends would have never expected me to be the first one to actually find a like-minded soul and win her heart. It would happen in the summer between my junior and senior years, at a place that might be called the Shangri-la for molecular biol
ogists.

  Located on the North Shore of Long Island, about forty miles outside New York City, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory occupies a small campus on the former company estate of a nineteenth-century whale-oil millionaire named John D. Jones. At its founding in 1890 the lab was involved in many aspects of research, including eugenics. After World War II an influx of immigrant European intellectuals made the lab a leader in the emerging field of molecular biology. By the time I got there in the summer of 1978, Cold Spring Harbor was the home of several Nobel Prize winners and was moving into neuroscience in a big way. The lab was led by James D. Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

  Ten college students were admitted to the summer Undergraduate Research Program (URP) and were fondly called URPs. The students selected for this work came from around the country, and were notable for being younger than everyone else on campus. We were assigned to work in the faculty labs, and allowed to sit in on classes offered mainly to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. I ended up working on yeast genetics because my Amherst genetics course included a semester-long yeast lab project. We lived in pretty spartan rooms with not much more than a single bed, an old wood bureau, and a shared nightstand. Cold Spring Harbor was the kind of place where you could sit in on a Nobel laureate’s lecture and bump into future prize winners in the hallways discussing new data. We were constantly reminded that a previous URP, David Baltimore, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had already won a Nobel Prize.