Will Eisner's A Contract with God

[alicemacher]

"[Although] I am largely unfamiliar with the Jewish milieu that forms Will Eisner's memories [...] [w]hat he has given us here are those memories, as tales, and realized in a fusion of image and copy. They are simple and they are harsh; there are no easy morals to be gotten from them. The Good Guys don't win and the Bad Guys don't lose because there are no good guys and bad guys. Instead, there are lonely, frightened and ambitious people, immigrants seeking relief from poverty, despair and the dread that, unhappy as the present is, the future may be worse. A man remembering that way is not likely to depict heroes and villains; rather, he will be compassionate to everyone, winner and loser alike, and compassion is the pervading, unstated theme of Eisner's work."
--Denny O'Neil, Introduction to the 2000 DC edition


"A Contract with God," first published in 1978 by Baronet Books, is the title story of Eisner's first major fiction comics publication since The Spirit. Although it's doubtful it was really the first "graphic novel," it was the first to be marketed as such. To those familiar with Eisner's work only through The Spirit, the story may seem melodramatic; however, melodrama isn't always a bad thing. Eisner drew not only on his memories, but also (consciously or not) on the highly emotion-driven Yiddish theatre of Eastern Europe and New York. I myself like to imagine Zero Mostel intoning the main character's lines on stage in an alternately pondering and booming voice, like a more tragic Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof.

Written, drawn and lettered by Eisner. 20 pages of 60.


Around the turn of the twentieth century, the elders of a small Hasidic Jewish town in Russia devastated by pogroms (organized anti-Jewish massacres) choose the young, pious Frimme Hersh to emigrate to America and preserve their heritage.







Frimme settles in the Bronx, living in a tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue, and becomes a pillar of the Hasidic community there, beloved for his good deeds and entrusted with synagogue finances. One day the still-unmarried man finds a baby girl left at his doorstep.





The years pass. Rachele contracts a sudden critical illness and dies. Frimme calls God out for violating his contract.







Receiving no response, Frimme says "Enough!" and spits on the contract.





The next day, he says his morning prayers for the last time.





What does Frimme offer for the tenement? The bonds his synagogue had entrusted to him. This is his first dishonest act.







More time passes. Frimme becomes a real estate tycoon and takes a non-Jewish mistress. Although many of his holdings change hands, he never sells the 55 Dropsie Avenue property, which he visits every so often.









One day, he meets with the elders of his old synagogue. Confessing that he used their bonds to start his real estate empire, he pays them back in full with interest. Then he asks them a favour: he wants them to draw him up a new contract with God.









So they prepare the contract. Reading it over, Frimme is happy for the first time in many years.






Some time after Frimme's death, a fire erupts in the neighbourhood, but miraculously 55 Dropsie Avenue is spared.




Shloime chases off some bullies with stones.

Comments

P.S.

[alicemacher]

Late in his life, Eisner revealed that this story was partly autobiographical. He lost his daughter Alice to leukemia when she was 16 and, like Frimme Hersh, he felt God had betrayed him:

"[Hersh's] argument with God was mine. I exorcised my rage at a deity that I believed violated my faith and deprived my lovely 16-year-old child of her life at the very flowering of it." (Michael Schumacher, Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics [Bloomsbury 2010], 197)

[nyadnar17]

"Then I will make a contract with God"

I got chills reading those words. The Old Testament (Moses until right before John) is kinda like the Hellraiser movies. Only instead of Lemarchand's box its those very words. Over and over again the Jewish people make contracts with God and over and over again they violate those contracts and suffer dearly for it. Every knew generation sure that this time THEY will be the ones to get it right.

[riddler13]

Hands down one of the best anthologies I've ever read.

[pyrrhocorax]

The thing is, God never signed the contract. When it comes to divine contracts, only God can lay out the terms and we get to choose whether to follow them (personally, I think many of them are pointless and some unfair, so I’m out) (however I still waffled back and forth on exactly how respectfully to write the word God in this post. Sigh...)

[alicemacher]

The archaeological record shows that the various law codes within the Torah (particularly in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) are structured much like ancient Near Eastern treaties between a powerful king (suzerain) and a less powerful one (vassal). In these, the suzerain promises to protect the vassal, provided the latter fulfills his obligations (paying taxes, supplying troops or labourers, etc.). Of course, it was the suzerain who got to dictate the terms.