Free Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family by Ezekiel J. Emanuel

that the Israelis were secretly fortifying their positions, which was against the agreement governing the situation. In fact, the IDF troops
were
working every night on fortifications, but given the gunfire coming from the other side, you could hardly blame them.
    While my father was there, he came under regular gunfire and risked his own life scurrying into the line of fire to help the wounded. Sometimes this happened in the middle of the break periods when the troops would make up teams and kick a soccer ball around a patch of dirt. My father, who was usually in the game, would run to the wounded player and help carry him to safety. Since he was acting as a medic, the snipers left him alone even when he returned to rescue the ball.
    Because he spoke fluent English my father also sometimes served as liaison with George Flint, a Canadian officer who oversaw the UN peacekeepers. Flint came every day with mail during a two-month period when the Jordanians blockaded Mount Scopus and my father and all the other Israelis were trapped there. At one point, he told my father he had been cleared to return to Canada but was staying on to arrange to ship a car home, duty-free.
    Thanks to Flint and the intervention of higher-level UN officials, the blockade was ended and my father was able to return home to discover that the two-month-old baby he had left behind was now six months old. Sporadic Jordanian attacks on Mount Scopus continued, however. In May 1958, Lieutenant Colonel Flint was killed by a Jordanian sniper as he waved a white flag and tried to escort some wounded Israelis to safety.
    The worry my father’s deployment caused my mother, the stress he experienced being separated from us, and the difficulty he faced in his effort to find work as a pediatrician began to weigh heavily on them. My father tried to start a private practice, adding this work to his job for the health ministry, but Tel Aviv already had too many physiciansand he saw few patients. When my mother became pregnant with Rahm in early 1959 they began to think hard about their options. Israel did not really need another pediatrician, especially one practicing outside of his field in order to just get by. At the same time, opportunity remained in America, where medicine, science, and technology were reaching new heights. He might even be able to train in a subspecialty like pediatric kidney disease.
    A return to America offered my mother a chance to be close to her family, old friends, and familiar comforts, but ironically enough, she was the one who was resistant and reluctant about returning to Chicago. In her fantasies, she refused to leave Tel Aviv and ran away with friends to make her point to her husband. But in the end, she understood why he wanted to go back to the States and agreed to it. It helped her to know that my father was hoping to come back someday. In fact, it seemed almost inevitable that he would become an experienced pediatric specialist in America and then, when conditions were right, return to Israel with a notable academic reputation, forcing the Israeli medical establishment to give him a spot where he could conduct research as well as see patients.

Four

AMERICA
     
    In 1959, Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital welcomed my father. He was soon a leader in the dialysis program, and an attending physician in the pediatric wards. Ambitious and eager to make money, my father searched the blocks south and west of the hospital for a convenient spot where he could see private patients but also get back to the hospital quickly when he was needed. A tiny storefront that could have suited a candy shop became the home of his one-man general practice. The neighborhood, which was about twenty-five blocks south of downtown, had changed dramatically in the previous decade as upwardly mobile Jewish families moved out and poorer black families moved in. Since several doctors had left along with their patients, the area needed physicians.
    In the