Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel,

  That day I began the search for what would, in the end, be a much better living situation. The location was a small house—two rooms downstairs and two upstairs—on the poor side of town, which I came to share with a young couple named Margaret and Danny. Margaret, a Cambridge graduate and grade school teacher, came from a prosperous family. (They got front-row seats to view the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana.) Danny had grown up in New York, where he attended the exclusive Dalton School. After earning an undergraduate degree at Cambridge he enrolled as a graduate student at Oxford. His rooms at the university were the ones Lewis Carroll had occupied as a math lecturer in the mid-nineteenth century.

  At the time when I moved in with Margaret and Danny, I was beginning to question all the little steps that had taken me so far from home. Linda and I had seen far less of each other than I expected, even though she was just fifty miles away. In the meantime, I was alienating the people at Oxford in much the same way that I had alienated the people at Amherst, by being myself.

  It all started with the way I conducted myself in Raymond Dwek’s immunology lab. Accustomed to long workdays, I arrived at the lab early and kept working late into the night. In contrast, the doctoral students and full-time technicians arrived at nine, took the usual lunch and tea breaks, and departed at five. My persistence bothered them, but so did the sound of my loud, squeaky voice and my bull-in-a-china-shop approach to getting things done. If I needed chemicals or other laboratory supplies and none were immediately available in the Dwek lab I scoured the other labs in the building until I found what I needed. I followed the same routine when it came to pieces of equipment, from pipettes and beakers to centrifuges. If someone was nearby, I asked them to lend me what I needed. If I came upon a key item that was unguarded, I simply took it.

  Yanks, according to British lore, were always too assertive, action-oriented, and ill-mannered. For a while the fuddy-duddies of Oxford circa 1979 tried to excuse my behavior on cultural grounds. But I was even more obnoxious than the stereotype and it wasn’t long before my mentor was hearing complaints.

  Fortunately, Professor Dwek, who was thirty-nine and reaching the top of his game, was one of the few in the Oxford faculty who could have tolerated and even encouraged me as I violated one British norm after another. An extremely confident scientist who had worked with colleagues around the world, Dwek was himself a Jew who knew that the British academy did not understand the concept or value of chutzpah. In my own experience, I came to see that Jews were even more misunderstood in England than they were in America. This was made clear to me by the senior technician on Dwek’s staff, who held an Oxford PhD. During the spring break he asked me in his Welsh accent what I planned to do to celebrate Easter. I explained to him that I was Jewish. He then said, “That’s fine, but where will you be going on Easter Sunday?” Despite working for a Jewish faculty member, he simply had no idea that Jews did not celebrate Easter. He really knew nothing at all about being Jewish.

  Raymond actually took more than a little pleasure in the ways that I annoyed those colleagues whom he considered to be stuffed shirts. Whenever the outrage over my behavior grew loud, he explained that I was not ill-mannered but simply “American.” He told people to think of me as “the equivalent of John McEnroe,” the tennis player who was as famous for his tantrums as for his championships. Raymond viewed this as a double win—the faculty who he thought deserved it were aggravated by me, and he was able to play the “nice” guy without really doing anything to curb my provocative behavior. Raymond’s work, which involved deciphering the behavior of specific antibodies that protect us from disease, required the kind of intensity I brought to the task. I may not have been the favorite of my peers but I was an effective research associate, and outside of work, Raymond found me and my broad interests—from philosophy to travel to the arts—to be good company.

  A teacher who became a friend, Raymond occasionally invited me to dine with him at his college’s high table. This meant donning a coat, tie, and an Oxford black gown and sitting at a long table set on a dais above the undergrad tables in the great eating hall at Exeter College. Raymond saw this as a way to fatten me up with an occasional good meal. Raymond was also kind enough to let me use his faculty rooms in the college for weekends with Linda. And he invited me to dinner at his home. Linda sometimes came with me to the Dwek home, where I hit it off well with Raymond’s wife and four children.

  In mid-January I served as photographer for his son Robert’s bar mitzvah party. When the party ended, I hopped on my bike, the standard means of transportation for just about every student—and many faculty members—in Oxford, and headed for my home, which was down the hill, through the center of Oxford to the other, poorer side of the Cherwell River, about three miles away. It was after midnight, and I shivered a bit in the cold air as I sped down the Botley Road and then onto George Street, which brought me into the center of the city. I turned right on Turl Street near Exeter College and then cut left onto the High Street.

  I had not gone more than a hundred feet when a police car overtook me, turned on its lights, and then veered into my lane. I swerved to avoid a collision, and was moving out to pass when the police car swerved again, forcing me to pull over to the curb and stop. The driver, a tall and big fellow in uniform, hopped out.

  “Why did you not stop back there?”

  “I didn’t think you were pulling over for me.”

  “We wanted you to stop.”

  “What was I doing wrong?” I shot back.

  “Are you drunk?” he said, putting his face closer to mine to intimidate me.

  “No. I’m not drunk.”

  At that time I was a teetotaler, and to demonstrate the fact, I blew into the police officer’s face. Not surprisingly, this gesture did not go over well. The officer’s partner jumped out of the squad car and came around to where we were standing. He announced that I was being taken into custody for not stopping at a corner and for resisting arrest. They put me in the back of their car and left my bike there to be picked up later.

  By the time all the paperwork was completed at the Oxford jail it was well past 1 A.M. and I decided to postpone calling Raymond for help. The officers walked me down to a stone cell already occupied by some guy who had been brought in earlier in the evening for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. They unlocked the bars and put me inside. I slid down the cold wall and sat on the freezing floor, staring at my unknown and incoherent cellmate, who was thrashing on the lower bunk. The only other furnishings in the cell were a toilet and a vomit bucket, both of which reeked.

  At 8 A.M. the jailers allowed me to call Raymond, who contacted the law lecturer at Exeter College. They came to bail me out. Before I left with my bike, the charges had been changed, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, to riding without a rear light. Ironically, despite my accent and obvious American citizenship, the Oxford police never asked me for my registration card; every foreigner living in Great Britain had to have one, documenting that he or she had registered with the local police every few months. I refused to register, which was a serious legal violation.

  I could have simply agreed to the charge against me and avoided a trial, but I am an Emanuel. I wanted my day in court. Two months after my arrest I appeared before the magistrate. When the prosecutor called for testimony from the arresting officers, the two men gave contradictory accounts of what had happened that night on High Street. Acting as my own lawyer, I nervously pointed out the inconsistencies in their stories and argued that no one could draw a reasonable conclusion based on such varied presentations of the facts. However, this was not a hearing dedicated to fact-finding, truth, or justice. The magistrate confined himself to affirming the charges and setting the fines I would be required to pay. He ordered me to pay 175 pounds, nearly five hundred dollars. This was far more money than I could possibly scrape up. Raymond paid the fine and allowed me to work off my debt to him by teaching Sunday school at his synagogue, giving tutorials in biochemistr
y to his Oxford undergrads, and grading their final exams for him.

  My time at Oxford between 1979 and 1981 was consistent with what many American students there experienced. We were often cold, hungry for decent food, and short on money. This was before Great Britain joined the European Union, imported continental foods, and developed phenomenal restaurants. The only food with any taste was Indian fare. And the combination of the cold and damp penetrated the bones in a way I never experienced in the States. Central heating still had not been installed in many houses; heat flowed from a few coils in small electric heaters that never warmed your body thoroughly. I did, however, enjoy one brief exciting moment when I became famous among the Brits, and also widely despised.

  The adventure arose in a roundabout way. BBC television was planning a new show called Now Get Out of That. BBC producers advertised in Oxford in the hope of identifying two students—a female undergraduate and a male graduate—to join a four-person “Oxford” team, including a local businessman and farmer, that would be dropped in some remote spot in the Welsh countryside. The Oxford team would compete against a Cambridge team to solve a series of puzzling tasks or missions. If this sounds like a forerunner of the TV show Survivor, then you’ve got the idea. First broadcast in August 1981, Now Get Out of That was arguably the world’s very first reality outdoor challenge program and it was destined to be must-see TV for four years running.

  Raymond Dwek had been dining at the high table in Exeter College with the BBC producer, who complained he could not find a suitable male graduate student for the Oxford team. Raymond considered my daily long-distance running and quirky, assertive personality and suggested me. I didn’t hesitate. In a matter of weeks I found myself in the middle of the vast estate surrounding Eastnor Castle with a camera crew and my three teammates. We were given two days to complete a variety of challenges using only our wits, our physical abilities, confusing hints, and the meager supplies provided by the producers.

  One of the tasks required us to build vehicles out of a collection of four bicycle frames and various parts and then ride across the countryside. Of course, we did not get enough wheels to construct bicycles for each of us. After much wrenching and tinkering, I decided to simply run ahead of my teammates as they pedaled.

  A second challenge found us deposited on a tiny island in the middle of a pond, where we were forced to use a cable system to cross the water without getting wet. Forced to spend the night outdoors in a downpour, we were supplied with just two dead rabbits, some carrots, potatoes, and bouillion, and wood for a fire. Falling into classic, gender-defined roles I skinned the rabbits while the two other men made the fire. The one woman on our team—the law student undergraduate—ended up doing the cooking.

  For the finale we had to invade the castle, retrieve a mysterious electronic device called “the Beast,” and return to a fixed raft in the castle’s lake. I pushed for quick solutions whenever we reached an obstacle and often simply took over a task when things got stalled. I knew as it was happening that I was being much louder and more direct than the others. They were British, which, in my view, meant they were too passive and willing to follow the rules we were given. The jobs at hand required energy, improvisation, and action, which I supplied in abundance while most of the others alternately followed my orders, argued meekly, or sullenly looked on.

  The exception was Derek, who was a middle-aged, crew-cut businessman who fancied that as the oldest he should be the team’s leader. Initially he tried to take charge. Instinctively, the other Brits deferred to him. But his authority fell apart on the very first challenge when it became apparent that he couldn’t read a simple map. I took the map from him and just kept pushing forward. Although we barked at each other continuously, the tension never quite reached the point where any punches were thrown.

  I give Derek most of the credit for the fact that we never came to blows. He was a well-meaning bloke and he did appreciate the successes we had. I actually tried hard to be good-natured, even after we had climbed a rope ladder to get into the castle only to discover that we could have strolled through an open door just around a corner. Fortunately, we still got to the Beast first, seized it, and raced toward our final task.

  The finish called for us to use a metal frame, wood, and some inflatable tubes to construct rafts that we would paddle across the lake and then, after capturing the Beast, to get to the floating raft. We fired the flare gun and a Royal Air Force helicopter appeared overhead. A sling was dropped down and, one by one, we were winched into the hovering aircraft. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever done. Intensely competitive, I was thrilled when we were informed that we had beaten Cambridge.

  After the contest was over, the film was edited and the host, Bernard Falk, added his witty narration. The four hours were aired over the course of four nights during the last week of August 1981 and drew a big audience. And though Derek and the others got plenty of “face time,” the voice that echoed constantly throughout the four episodes was not the one speaking the Queen’s English.

  From the very first scene I was presented as a caricature of the kind of rude, pushy American whom the British love to hate. Overnight, the media decided that I was worthy of scorn and had a field day making fun of me. Russell Davies of The Sunday Times of London called me “the excitable Zeke Emanuel” and described my “star turn” this way:

  The camera seldom got a good look at Zeke, as he was mostly a gesticulating blur, but the microphone got no rest from his terrible voice: a high warbling desperate mode of utterance such as might have been heard lecturing its parents in bad feature films of the post—James Dean period. Zeke was that worst of pains, a pain in the ear.

  As I recall, Davies was the kindest of the commentators. Summing up at the end of the show, Bernard Falk said, “Zeke is pushy, but where would Oxford be without him?” Andy Oram insists that people excoriated me in letters to the editors published in papers all across Great Britain and that one of the tabloids elected me the most disliked person in the land. (Ironically, before the show was aired, I had left Britain to start medical school in the United States. I would not see the show for another three decades, when my daughters gave me a copy for Hanukkah in 2011.) The British especially hated that I led Oxford to victory.

  But not everyone viewed me with disdain. A few weeks after the series aired, some of Linda’s friends went walking in the Scottish Highlands and discovered, inside a hut built as a resting place for hikers, a note advising visitors who faced hardships to “be like Zeke.”

  In time the experience would help me see, with a bit more clarity, who I was in comparison with others. I was loud, fast, pushy, and incredibly competitive. But I was also the only member of the cast who would be both indispensable and memorable. I was willing to accept both the good and the bad, including the bit about how I resembled a movie character “lecturing its parents,” because it was pretty close to the truth. And I wasn’t embarrassed by who I was.

  As my brothers made their way into adulthood, they also ran into critics and opponents. In France, where Ari was spending a semester abroad, he encountered lots of people who challenged his views on life and how it should be lived. He adapted well enough, learning to speak passable French and accepting local customs. But he was still the same old Ari, ever willing to take risks and push things to the limit. When the Glass brothers stopped to see him during their own trip to Europe, they found him to be more worldly, but no less ornery. He was starting to resent the put-downs and dirty looks he got from natives who recognized him as an American and he was veering dangerously close to the kind of attitude that had meant trouble for him over the years.

  When Michael Glass came home he told a story about going with Ari to a little café for some food. Short on money, they declined the expensive bottled water that servers tend to push on diners and asked for tap water instead. The waiter sniffed and walked away. Ari waited for the waiter to pass him three or four times before he called out loudly to remind him
to bring the water. Under his breath the man muttered in French, “I’m not your dog.” Ari heard him and jumped up, puffed out his chest, and growled, “Tu es mon chien.” Thus informed that he was indeed Ari’s dog, the waiter hustled off and returned with the water on a tray. All the while, Michael Glass studied the sharp corkscrew tucked into the waistband of the waiter’s pants, wondering if he was going to attack. The chien turned out to be all bark and no bite and Ari chalked up another victory in his never-ending confrontation with the world.

  After college, Ari knocked around in New York for a while, trying various businesses. My father, who considered advanced degrees to be insurance against unemployment and the tyranny of bosses, urged him to get an MBA. Ari could have gone into the MBA program at Northwestern. However, just as I had deviated from my father’s advice in order to study bioethics, Ari decided to search for something more exciting and fulfilling than the classroom. Through a friend he was hired by a legendary New York talent agent named Robert Lantz. Already in his seventies when Ari met him, “Robbie” Lantz was the son of a German screenwriter who had escaped the Nazis by fleeing to London. There Robbie had worked for years as a story editor and consultant for American film companies. He finally came to the United States in the late 1940s to work as an agent. He wound up representing a roster of writers, actors, and directors that was the envy of the industry. Among them were Milos Forman, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Bette Davis, Montgomery Clift, and James Baldwin. He also represented the estate of Damon Runyon.

  Robbie was the quintessential New York character. A regular at the Russian Tea Room, he attended all the important theater openings and frequently wrote letters to the editor of the Times to complain about the rude service delivered by ushers and ticket-takers at the theater or about crime rates that kept law-abiding citizens out of Central Park at night.