Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [128]
At the opening of the story, Jacob Shtarkah learns that the job he’s had for five years, building a library at his synagogue, has come to an end. This is Depression-era New York, and finding any kind of new employment is going to be difficult. Worse yet, in Shtarkah’s mind, is the knowledge that the library is going to be named after the men who funded its construction rather than the man who actually built it. A library bearing his name was Shtarkah’s one chance at immortality, a reward for a life that otherwise had very few rewards, and now it has been denied him.
On his way home from the synagogue, Shtarkah suffers a mild heart attack and collapses in the alleyway next to his tenement building. As he sits on the ground, waiting either to die or regain his strength, a cockroach, shaken out of a rug two floors above, plops down on the ground near him, prompting a one-sided conversation that encapsulates the essence of the book.
“You, being only a cockroach, just want to live!” Jacob declares. “For you it’s enough! But me … I have to ask, why!?”
The answer, Jacob believes, lies in whether man created God or vice versa. “If man created God, then the reason for life is only in the mind of man,” Jacob says. “If, on the other hand, God created man, then the reason for living is still only a guess! After all is said and done, who really knows the will of God? So, in either case, both man and cockroach are in serious trouble, because staying alive seems to be the only thing on which everybody agrees.”
“When Jacob talked to the cockroach in the alley, he is speaking my thoughts,” Eisner stated in an interview published shortly after the completion of A Life Force. “I wanted to draw some parallels between man’s and the roach’s survival. My objective was to present this debate Jacob has with himself to the reader. All of the things expressed in this novel are for readers to decide. It’s in the nature of an intellectual exercise.”
Page from A Life Force. (Courtesy of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.)
Willie, like Eisner in his own youth, is politically left of center, a union sympathizer, and a true believer in society’s potential for social justice. The Communist Party, a mainstay in the intellectual circles of New York’s Greenwich Village during the Depression, has caught the attention of the union organizers, and a rally, guaranteed to attract the news media, is planned. Willie, an aspiring artist, along with one of his friends, volunteers to make signs for it.
While Willie busies himself designing ways to save the workers of the world through social and economic revolution, his father, owner of a tiny fur factory (similar to the one once owned by Sam Eisner), is visited by a couple of union strong-arms trying to muscle their way into the shop. Willie’s father and the plant foreman attempt to explain that theirs is a small shop employing only three workers, and that those workers are currently earning union wages, but the thugs won’t listen to reason. During an ensuing scuffle, the shop foreman is beaten on the head and sustains wounds that will leave permanent brain damage. When Willie’s father returns home to find his son working on pro-union, pro-Communist signs, he flies into a rage and throws Willie’s friend out of the house, forcing Willie to make an immediate decision: the cause or his family. Willie chooses family, ending his brief life as a revolutionary.
Eisner worked other autobiographical details into A Life Force. Elton Shaftsbury, a young stock market player ruined in the crash and pondering suicide, shared some of the characteristics of Ann Eisner’s father. A rabbi offering cut-rate bar mitzvah lessons in the tenement gave Eisner opportunity for subtle commentary on the relationship between God and money—a lesson he and his father were taught on the steps of the synagogue many years earlier during the High Holy Days, when Sam Eisner couldn’t afford the standard donation necessary for entry. A brilliant but mentally disturbed young man named Aaron, isolated from the world and tormented by his own raging thoughts,