The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World

 
Introduction

On an early morning in the fall of 1917, Herman Smu­levitz hurriedly kissed his mother and then slipped onto a ship docked at a port on the Black Sea. He was ten years old. He would never see his mother again.
 
World War I was nearing its end and Russia was in turmoil, in the midst of a revolution that would soon lead to a civil war. The country, and vast parts of eastern Europe, were swept up in what would become the third wave of devastating pogroms—the organized massacres of Jews that had been periodically ravaging this part of the world for more than a century. This last wave was the most savage of them all. Anti-Semitic mobs, stirred into a frenzy by the chaos in Russia, raped and pillaged and murdered Jews in the former Polish-Lithuanian lands within Russian bor­ders, known as the Pale of Settlement, where Herman and his mother lived.
 
Herman’s mother had come to the stark conclusion that the only chance of survival her son had was to flee to the United States. She was most likely correct: There is no record of her exis­tence after she told her son goodbye that day.
 
I am eternally grateful and indebted to her for her sacrifice and for the love she had for her son. Herman Smulevitz was my grandfather.
 
Herman boarded that boat by himself, a stowaway. He had with him only a few useless coins in his pockets and a note with the name of his father, who had abandoned his family and left for the U.S. after Herman was born, and the word “Indiana” written on it. Weeks later, Herman landed at Ellis Island in New York City, that great gateway of hope and renewed dreams for so many like him, and made his way to a small town in Indiana. There he somehow found his father’s house. But when he arrived at the front door—unable to speak English, dirty, and probably wearing the same tattered clothes he’d had on since the day he left Russia—his new stepmother shut the door in his face, turn­ing him away. With nowhere else to go, Herman traveled to Chi­cago, where he found an uncle who worked on Maxwell Street, a gateway neighborhood for immigrants on the Near West Side of the city. It was there that my grandfather began to seize his opportunity for a new life.
 
My grandfather’s formal education ended in the fifth grade, but he sat at the kitchen table every morning before breakfast and forced himself to read newspapers and books, teaching him­self to speak English and learning about the world. He started earning a wage as a young teen, jumping from one odd job to the next, sweeping floors or delivering goods on foot. He grew quickly and grandly, exiting his teenage years as a six-foot-three, 230-pound man. He began to box. He fought for prize money all over the Midwest, though he was denied the chance to fight for the bigger purses offered in the South because of his Jewish surname. He had huge hands, with fingers “like big Polish sausages,” as my brother Ezekiel always described them. He later found work in lumberyards and steel mills. He butchered meat. He was a union man through and through, and would become a staunch Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat. His longest-serving job was as a deliveryman for Scandinavian Meat. He was charismatic and loud and profane, a big presence, and not just physically. My two brothers and I nicknamed him “Big Banger,” which, when we said it, sounded like “Big Bangah.” He was a tough, hard man, a true laborer, but also a people person. Sometimes he would take my brothers and me with him on his deliveries. He’d barge into a store and shake the hands and slap the backs of everyone he saw. He knew everyone’s name, it seemed, and everyone knew his. Later in his life he would help build a community synagogue on Kedzie Avenue. He eventually moved to North Lawndale, on the old West Side of Chicago, then known as the “vest side” to his fellow eastern European Jews who lived there.
 
At a dance one night in Douglas Park in the mid-1920s, Herman met a woman named Sophie Lampert. She had her own remarkable immigration story, having only recently escaped from Moldova, a part of Romania, on a ship with her two sisters. Herman and Sophie eventually got married and had three daughters and two sons. One of those daughters was named Marsha. She is my mother.
 
Marsha became a radiologist technician at Mount Sinai Hospital in the North Lawndale community. There she met a man named Benjamin Emanuel, a pediatrician who worked at the hospital. His father, Ezekiel Auerbach, had been a pharmacist in Israel. When the family lived in Israel, Benjamin’s brother, Manuel, was struck in the leg by a bullet while attending a protest in Jerusalem in 1933. He died a few weeks later from an infection. Soon after, the Auerbachs changed their surname to Emanuel in his honor.
 
Benjamin and Marsha married and had three sons—Ezekiel (Zeke), and then me, and then Ariel (Ari)—and later adopted a daughter named Shoshana. We grew up in a series of differ­ent apartments in Chicago, starting in neighborhoods with low rents and a mix of immigrants, Jews and Catholics and poor whites who had migrated north from southern Appalachia. We fled one of those apartments—a crumbling flat with leaky fau­cets and peeling paint—because one night my mother found a rat sitting next to me in my crib. (We moved to Wilmette when I was in the fifth grade. I would return to the city—to Cornelia Avenue in Wrigleyville—after graduating from college in 1982.)
 
My father coupled his hospital job with a private practice, and he worked seventy hours a week seeing a range of patients, from those so poor that he provided them with free treatment to the sons and daughters of famous ballplayers on the Chicago Cubs. But he always made time for his kids. His favorite game to play with us was chess. He never took it easy on us, never let us win. He encouraged us to think three moves ahead and always to imagine our opponent’s response to our potential moves.
 
My mother was an activist. She believed that it was our duty to fight for people who were suffering in this world. She was arrested numerous times while protesting. She stood in the crowd at the Mall in Washington, D.C., and watched Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his “I have a dream” speech. She marched in protests with her three toddler sons in tow, and always took us along to the polling station to watch her vote. She took us to hear King speak in Chicago in 1966. She helped organize a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Our landlord kicked our family out of an apartment on West Buena Avenue because he didn’t like the mixed-race gatherings my mother hosted there.
 
I know it might be hard to believe now, but I grew up as a quiet, attentive child. My mother and brothers tell me that I didn’t speak much when we were gathered together, but merely observed. That changed after an incident when I was seventeen. I sliced the middle finger on my right hand while working one day at my job at an Arby’s. The finger—and my hand and arm—eventually became infected, and I spent seven weeks in the hos­pital. The doctors were able to save my hand and arm, but they were forced to remove half of my middle finger. I don’t remem­ber much after the surgery, but Zeke told me that when the doc­tor unwrapped my hand for the first time, I flipped everyone the bird and then declared that I would have to do it twice now for the desired effect. Something changed in me after that accident. A quiet, introverted kid suddenly became transformed into a garrulous teen full of energy and a fierce and focused desire to...