Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [149]
The mountain he was talking about was just up ahead. Conquering it would involve one of the biggest struggles of his career.
chapter fifteen
T H E H E A R T O F T H E M A T T E R
I think many of us in this business are Don Quixotes. Anybody in the business of innovation is in pursuit of something that nobody else believes exists.
In the spring of 1989, Eisner began work on his lengthiest graphic novel since A Life Force. This new book, eventually published as To the Heart of the Storm, was designed to focus on the insidious forces of anti-Semitism in the Depression-era New York of Eisner’s youth. It was to be a work of fiction, but after numerous reworkings, it would become the most autobiographical work Eisner would ever create.
Earlier books had addressed compelling personal issues in his life, but aside from The Dreamer and “Cookalein,” his autobiographical coming-of-age short story in A Contract with God, Eisner consciously avoided depicting actual events from his private life in his work. Whether this choice was a matter of dignity or courage is a subject for debate. According to Eisner, he had changed the names in The Dreamer to avoid embarrassing living people depicted in the book, but as he would admit in interviews after the publication of To the Heart of the Storm, he found “standing naked in the drill field,” his description of the self-reflection required for the process of autobiographical writing, exceedingly difficult.
“When I was younger, I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he confessed. “I didn’t dare bare those details of my life. I think autobiographies are done mostly by older people because they have reached the point where they don’t have much to lose.”
In writing about the Depression and the uneasy period leading up to World War II, Eisner almost inevitably included incidents from his own life. After all, he had lived through the period, and he adhered to the old axiom that a writer should write about what he or she knows. As a young boy, he’d coped with anti-Semitism in his own neighborhood, and his brother, Julian, had permanently lost a precious part of his identity because of a flashpoint moment on the street and the resulting name change. Sam Eisner’s story, from his days in Vienna to his eventual move to the Bronx, exemplified the European Jewish immigrant experience and the hardships of adjusting to life in America. And to illustrate the way Jews were socially shunned, Eisner needed only to deliver a heartbreaking story from his own youth, when a girl whom he fancied, not knowing that he was Jewish, invited him to a party, only to learn the truth from one of Eisner’s rivals and panic about how her parents would react to her bringing a Jewish boy into their home. The book, Eisner decided, would achieve its greatest impact as a straight-on memoir rather than a fictionalized account.
Still, for a man accustomed to controlling the flow of public information about his private life, Eisner found writing about his family especially problematic. Even though both of his parents had died years earlier, Eisner agonized over how to portray them in his book. He didn’t trust the accuracy of his memory, and he knew that if he was as truthful as his memory permitted, his parents—or at the very least his mother—would not be seen as sympathetic characters.
“To write about your parents and their lives is very painful,” he said, likening the process to the catharsis of psychotherapy. “You have to fight