A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories

AUTHOR: Eisner, Will

ARTIST: Will Eisner (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Baronet Books; Kitchen Sink Press

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1978

Publication History

Will Eisner spent two years working on the four stories that make up A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories. Hoping to create a more mature form of “sequential art,” Eisner’s career was rejuvenated by the work, which indicated a new potential for comic books. The book was first published by Baronet Press in October of 1978, with an initial run of fifteen hundred hardcover copies. DC Comics acquired the rights to the work in 2001 and reissued it as part of the Will Eisner Library imprint. The book also forms the first part of The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue, a collection published by W. W. Norton in 2006.

The other two novels in the collection, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue, were published later and separately. A Life Force was first serialized from 1983 to 1985 in Will Eisner Quarterly and eventually collected and published in book form by Kitchen Sink Press in 1988. Eisner considered A Life Force, along with A Contract with God, to be his most accomplished work because it demonstrated the full potential of graphic novels. The final installation in the trilogy was Dropsie Avenue, which was first published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1995 as Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood.

Plot

A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, consists of four stories, “A Contract with God,” “The Street Singer,” “The Super,” and “Cookalein,” related by their common setting of a single tenement in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City. “A Contract with God” follows the life of Frimme Hersh, who makes a contract with God as a young boy, escaping the pogroms of czarist Russia. Although the reader never learns the details of the contract, Hersh strives to live a holy life, helping those in need in his new home in the United States. Hersh eventually adopts an orphan child, Rachele, who dies while still a young girl. Devastated, Hersh claims that God has violated his end of the contract; he rejects his faith and becomes a greedy slumlord. Eventually, he repents and has three rabbis write up a new contract with God, only to be struck dead by a heart attack as he reads it.

“The Street Singer,” set during the Great Depression, focuses on a day in the life of Eddie, a destitute man with a golden voice who sings for pennies in alleyways in the Bronx. Eddie is discovered by a former opera singer, Marta Maria, who renames him “Ronald Barry” and becomes both his manager and his lover. However, at one point, Eddie realizes that he cannot remember where Marta lives, which dooms him to a life of ignominy and poverty.

“The Super” follows the manager of 55 Dropsie Avenue, Mr. Scruggs, on the day of his death. A German immigrant, Scruggs is constantly irritated by the demands and disrespect of the tenants in his building. His only comforts are his dog, Hugo, and the countless photos of naked women covering his basement room. However, these both prove to be his downfall, as the ten-year-old niece of a tenant sneaks down to Scruggs’s room, offering to give him a glimpse of her genitals for a nickel. Scruggs agrees, but the young girl poisons his dog and steals the rest of his money while he is distracted. With the police on their way and his beloved dog dead, Scruggs stokes the furnace one last time, locks himself in his room, and shoots himself in the head.

The final portion of the original volume, “Cookalein,” presents a broader perspective by illustrating several narratives rather than just one story line. It takes place at the farms in the mountains of upstate New York where vacationers from the crowded city spend their summers. The story follows three different groups of characters as they explore their sexuality outside the confining city.

A Life Force, the second novel, documents the survival instinct of the Shtarkah family during the Great Depression. Through an extended simile comparing humanity and cockroaches, the plot interweaves a historical account of the Great Depression with the family’s attempt to live and prosper amid the economic hardship in America during the 1930’s.

Dropsie Avenue, the final novel in the trilogy, is a history of a fictional street in the Bronx, from the 1870’s to the modern day. It depicts the cycle of urban decay and renewal through the ethnic divisions, individual exploitation, and daily life of the tenement apartment building at 55 Dropsie Avenue.

Characters

•Frimme Hersh, the protagonist of the first story, is a short, portly, rabbinical-looking man in traditional Jewish religious dress. Once his adopted daughter dies, he shaves his beard, discards his religious attire, and becomes a slumlord, complete with suit, tie, and a cigar clamped between his fat lips. His callous disregard for the community following this transformation provides a thematic foundation for the entire collection.

•Eddie, the street singer, is an athletic-looking man in his mid-thirties. He dresses shabbily and drinks heavily, which causes his appearance to vary drastically throughout the story. His familial- and self-abuse contribute to his downfall.

•Mr. Scruggs, the superintendent, is a short, fat, bald German who looks similar to his beloved dog, Hugo. He desires respect and authority yet receives only derision and demands from the tenants. His lust proves ruinous: Humiliated and shamed after falling for the seductions of a young girl, he shoots himself while holding the corpse of his poisoned dog in his arms.

•Goldie is a beautiful young secretary at a fur shop. She goes away to the country on vacation, intent to find a rich husband. She puts on airs to appear wealthy and refuses the attentions of men she deems below her station. She falls for Benny, who attempts to rape her in the woods when he finds out that she is not wealthy. She is rescued by Herbie, who marries her.

•Benny attempts to find a wealthy spouse by going to the country and pretending to be wealthy. Initially attracted to Goldie, whom he believes is from a prosperous family, he attacks her when she reveals that she is poor. He is dashing and handsome and ends up seducing a diamond heiress.

•Jacob Shtarkah, the protagonist of A Life Force, is an aging Jewish carpenter most often pictured wearing a hat and overcoat. Downtrodden and distraught at losing work, he is pessimistic and continually questions the nature of the human experience and the existence of God.

•Elton Shaftsbury, a well-educated, wealthy, young white man, loses his inheritance during the stock market crash and nearly kills himself. He finds work as a runner in a brokerage firm, where he eventually becomes partner by suggesting shrewd investments that benefit both the firm and the Shtarkah family. He eventually marries Jacob’s daughter, Rebecca Shtarkah, who is pregnant with his child.

•Izzy Cash is a ragpicker and clothes seller who eventually saves enough money to buy the tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue. Dirty and disheveled, with a coarse beard and vest that highlights his short stature, he is self-interested and contributes to the urban decay of his neighborhood until prompted toward philanthropy by Abie Gold.

•Abie Gold is a young skinny Jewish boy with curly hair and glasses living on Dropsie Avenue who grows up to be a powerful lawyer and politician in the Bronx. As a lawyer, he attaches himself to powerful men but continually tries to help those in the Dropsie Avenue neighborhood.

Artistic Style

Eisner has called comic art a type of impressionism, and his own work is an attempt to depict life realistically. He was greatly influenced by European experimental woodcut graphic artists; in the preface to the trilogy, he claims to have aspired to a similar form in writing A Contract with God. This emulation is evident in the single-line shading he uses throughout the trilogy, reminiscent of woodcut art. The roughness of the shading contributes to Eisner’s vaunted realistic style, because his landscapes, buildings, and even people are less sharply defined and contrasted, just as in real life. His ability to make ordinary characters memorable became a hallmark of his realism. Even so, he also occasionally employs stock characters, such as short, obese men with predatory, squinting eyes for the “bad guys.”

All three novels in The Contract with GodTrilogy are produced solely in black-and-white ink, which simultaneously enhances their realistic, gritty feel and pays homage to the woodcut art that inspired them. The world of the tenements they depict is one of alleyways, shadow, dirt, and grime, and Eisner does not artificially brighten the events by employing color. Eisner is generally known for an easy-reading style of uncluttered squares of dialogue, expressive lettering, and figures that seem to be drawn like the cartoon strips of his early career.

Even though The Contract with God Trilogy took more than sixteen years to complete, there is remarkably little difference in the artistic style Eisner employs for the three novels. Nevertheless, there are minor exceptions. For example, A Life Force introduces entire pages of outside text, usually newspaper accounts of the Great Depression, in order to place the struggles of the Shtarkah family into historical context.

Themes

The primary thematic concerns of A Contract with God are existential. A Contract with God and A Life Force both contain protagonists who wrestle with both the existence of God and the significance of their actions in a seemingly arbitrary world. Eisner felt that in writing about the human relationship with God, he could explore a subject that had never been dealt with in comics. Furthermore, by addressing a fundamental question of the human experience, the novel had the potential to be taken more seriously than a mere comic book.

Frimme Hersh’s contract with God questions the validity of religious faith, and the theme receives even more treatment in A Life Force, in which Jacob Shtarkah repeatedly reflects upon the will to live that animates the human experience. Some readers find Eisner to be fatalistic in his approach to spirituality, noting the lack of human agency and the indifference of the universe to the plight of individuals throughout the work.

Nearly all of the stories that comprise The Contract with God Trilogy contain some depiction of human sexuality, which is another important theme in Eisner’s graphic novels. Nudity and sexual relationships drive the plot of stories such as “The Super” and “Cookalein,” and Jacob Shtarkah’s rekindled affair with the love of his youth influences the plot of A Life Force. For all of the nudity and sex acts presented within A Contract with God, Eisner does not present the sexual behavior of his characters in a way that promotes condemnation. Rather, his depiction of sexuality implies that it is an animating and natural part of the human experience.

Much of Eisner’s later work explores his Jewish identity. A Contract with God is primarily concerned with Jewish characters and their interaction with other ethnic and racial groups. With the exception of “The Super,” all of the stories contain Jewish protagonists. Eisner claimed to have patterned the characters in A Contract with God after real figures from his own life growing up as a young boy in a Bronx tenement. Consequently, the novels establish autobiography, Jewish history, and ethnic experiences in general as important themes in the collection.

Impact

Produced during the Bronze Age (1970’s-1980’s) and Modern Age (late 1980’s- ) of comics, A Contract with God is somewhat reminiscent of comics from earlier periods. In fact, had Eisner ended his career during the 1960’s, he would still be regarded as a major figure in comics. However, his most influential and important works were produced in the final part of his long career, and, in large part, it is because of his efforts that graphic novels receive widespread recognition today.

A Contract with God remains the work most often credited with establishing graphic novels as a literary medium worthy of serious artistic and philosophical study. Eisner claimed that he came up with the term “graphic novel” as a way to avoid pitching a publisher a comic book. He later realized that he was not the first to use the phrase (although he is often credited with inventing it).

In a 2002 speech, he acknowledged that his lifelong dream was for sequential art to be recognized as a form of literature by the academic community. Eisner was, more than any other American comic artist, responsible for bringing about that level of recognition. His graphic novels, while foundational and accomplished in their own right, inspired most of the premier American graphic novelists, including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, and Neil Gaiman. Many of Eisner’s works have been analyzed in premier literary journals, and academic conferences, awards, and journals that discuss graphic novels have been named in his honor.

Further Reading

Eisner, Will. Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories (2007).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Spirit Archives (2000-2009).

Bibliography

Andelman, Bob. Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. Milwaukie, Ore.: M Press, 2005.

Beronä, David A. “Breaking Taboos: Sexuality in the Work of Will Eisner and the Early Wordless Novels.” International Journal of Comic Art 1, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1999): 90-103.

Couch, N. C. Christopher, and Stephen Weiner. The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel. New York: DC Comics, 2004.

Dauber, Jeremy. “Comic Books, Tragic Stories: Will Eisner’s American Jewish History.” In The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Eisner, Will. “Comic and the New Literary: An Essay.” Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies 1, no. 2 (May, 1994): 2-5.

Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.