Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [1]
His real world bore little resemblance to this. He was born in Austria, in Kollmei, a village not far from Vienna. His father, a laborer—“a kerosene miner or something like that,” as Will Eisner would recall—had all he could handle in feeding his wife and eleven children.
Although he never formally studied art, Sam was a natural painter, gifted with backgrounds and landscapes, enough so that when he moved to Vienna as a teenager, he was able to find a job as a muralist’s apprentice. Wealthy patrons hired him to paint scenes on the walls of their homes, or more often Sam would find himself decorating the walls and ceilings of Vienna’s Roman Catholic churches. This irony, of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Jewish boy painting blue skies and fluffy clouds and rosy-faced singing cherubim in a Catholic church, would amuse his son for his entire adult life.
One by one, Sam’s brothers and sisters moved away, some to other cities in Europe, others overseas to America, where they established residence, found work, and sent for other siblings. Rather than face enlistment in the army, Sam left Vienna for the United States, arriving in New York just before the outbreak of World War I. If he envisioned America as a land brimming with opportunity and potential wealth, that notion was quickly put to rest. Sam knew how to speak German and Yiddish, but not English, and he learned early on that job hunting was going to be challenging: there was very little demand for alfresco painters in New York City. He eventually landed a job as a background painter for stages in Yiddish and vaudeville theaters—a far cry from the kind of art he aspired to create and earning him barely enough to get by. Like many immigrants, he attended night school to learn English, but it was tedious and the language came slowly to him.* Fortunately, though, he was gregarious and charming by nature, and he made friends easily.
Perhaps it was this charm, and particularly his ability to tell a good story, that attracted Fannie Ingber to him, for it is otherwise difficult to imagine what brought together this most unlikely couple. Fannie, a Romanian, had been born on April 25, 1891, on a ship bound for America. Her father, Isaac, seventy at the time of her birth, had been married to Fannie’s mother’s older sister, and when she died of influenza, he’d returned to his homeland for another wife. Fannie’s mother, a sickly woman, died on Fannie’s tenth birthday, and Isaac Ingber died later that same year, leaving Fannie in the custody of an older stepsister, Rose, who treated her more like a slave than family. Besides being overloaded with household chores, Fannie helped Rose do piecework for a garment factory and looked after her younger brother and sister. She found very little time or use for enjoying friends, hobbies, or the big city around her. When she grew older, she dated a few young men, but none of them met with the approval of her stepsister, who in all likelihood was more concerned about losing a servant than gaining a brother-in-law.
Fannie dreamed of saving enough money to open her own business, preferably a bakery, but by the time she had met, courted, and married Sam Eisner, she was hard-bitten and realistic enough to know that dreams were meant for people with better backgrounds than hers. She had worked while others had attended school; she knew English, but she couldn’t read or write it—a fact that she went to great lengths to hide from her children. Factory work, at which she had excelled, had prepared her for a life of repetition. To Fannie, life was something to endure.
According to Will Eisner, his parents were distantly related, maybe second or third cousins, and they had been introduced