Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [112]
The “it,” more specifically, was a lengthy, cohesive work exploring themes and topics that might appeal to older readers—perhaps readers in their thirties, forties, or maybe even older than that—readers who might have grown up reading The Spirit, readers no longer attracted to superhero adventures but still interested in comics.
Eisner was still haunted by his daughter’s death, by the unspeakable sadness and anger he’d felt when he’d watched helplessly as Alice succumbed to leukemia. At the heart of his rage were questions and issues that he’d never thought of exploring in his work, all focusing on an individual’s relationship to God. By his own admission, Eisner was not a religious man. He had been brought up to believe in a deity, but life had left him an agnostic grasping for faith. Alice’s death had embittered him, but it had also deepened some of his reflections on the idea of a personal God. If such an all-powerful, all-knowing being existed, where was He when Alice became ill? Why had He let her suffer and die when she was so young? Religious leaders had preached that the virtuous were rewarded, that they had a contract with God that promised good things to those living an honorable life. Yes, human beings violated the contract from time to time—they were human, after all—but an omnipotent God had to be held to a higher standard. Alice’s death had been a violation of a contract, a type of betrayal for which there could be no answer.
Eisner had pondered these issues since his daughter’s death, and though years would pass before he was able to publicly admit that his long graphic story “A Contract with God” had emerged directly from those horrible times in his life, his tale about Frimme Hersh, a good man devastated by the loss of his adopted daughter, was as personal as anything he had published in four decades of comics writing.
“The creation of this story was an exercise in personal agony,” he wrote in the preface to The Contract with God Trilogy, a grouping of three Eisner books set in a fictitious tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx and published in 2006, nearly four decades after Alice Eisner’s death.
My grief was still raw. My heart still bled. In fact, I could not even then bring myself to discuss the loss. I made Frimme Hersh’s daughter an “adopted child.” But his anguish was mine. His argument with God was also 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.
Eisner set the tone for his story in its opening pages, picturing Hersh, a single, middle-aged man, stooped over in grief and walking through torrential rain. He is returning home from his daughter’s funeral. Eisner had always used rain—Harvey Kurtzman dubbed it “Eisenshpritz”—to establish mood and a sense of reality to his art, from The Spirit to his work in P*S magazine; but the sheer weight of Nature’s own grief, gathering in pools on the street, rushing down the stairs of the stoop leading to the tenement building, and forming watery footprints in the hallway inside, matches Hersh’s sense of overwhelming loss. When Hersh pulls off his shoes and sits on a tiny stool near the window of his apartment, his head buried in his hands and a single candle burning on a table nearby, he almost disappears into himself. His despair is palpable. The story immediately flashes back to the days of Frimme Hersh’s youth in Russia before Hersh’s immigration to the United States, to accounts of his many acts of kindness that led others to believe that he was truly blessed, of his literally setting his contract with God in stone, and of his finding a baby girl abandoned on his doorstep