A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, often referred to simply as A Contract with God, is a graphic novel written and illustrated by American cartoonist Will Eisner and published in 1978. The book's short story cycle revolves around poverty-stricken Jewish characters who live in a tenement in New York City. Eisner produced two sequels set in the same tenement: A Life Force in 1988, and Dropsie Avenue in 1995. The term "graphic novel" originated in 1964, but A Contract with God is credited with initiating its widespread use.
Four stand-alone stories make up the book: in "A Contract with God", a religious man gives up his faith after the death of his young adopted daughter; in "The Street Singer, a has-been diva tries to seduce a poor, young street singer, who tries to take advantage of her in turn; an antisemitic tenement manager commits suicide after accusations of pedophilia in "The Super"; and "Cookalein" intertwines the stories of several characters vacationing in the Catskill Mountains. The stories are thematically linked with motifs of frustration, disillusionment, violence, and issues of ethnic identity. Eisner uses large, monochromatic images in dramatic perspective and emphasizes the caricatured characters' facial expressions; few panels or captions have traditional borders around them.
Eisner began his comic book career in 1936 and had long held artistic ambitions for what was perceived as a lowbrow medium. He found no support for his ideas, and left the world of commercial comics after ending his signature work The Spirit in 1952. The growth of comics fandom convinced him to return in the 1970s, and he worked to realize his aspirations of creating comics with literary content. He desired a mainstream publisher for the book and to have it sold in traditional bookstores, rather than in comic book shops; the small press Baronet Books released A Contract with God in 1978 and marketed it as a "graphic novel", which thereafter became the common term for book-length comics. It sold slowly at first but gained respect from Eisner's peers, and it has since been reprinted by larger publishers. A Contract with God cemented Eisner's reputation as an elder statesman of comics, and he continued to produce graphic novels and theoretical works on comics until his death in 2005.
Content and plot summaries A Contract with God mixes melodrama with social realism. Following an author's introduction, "A Tenement in the Bronx", the book contains four stories set in a tenement building; they derive in part from Eisner's personal memories growing up in a tenement in the Bronx. With A Contract with God he aimed to explore an area of Jewish-American history that he felt was underdocumented, while showing that capable of mature literary expression, at a time when it received little such regard as an artistic medium. In the preface he stated his aim to keep the exaggeration in his cartooning within realistic limits.
The story "A Contract with God" drew from Eisner's feelings over the death of his daughter, Alice, at sixteen years old. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the book, Eisner first wrote about it and the feelings he felt toward God that were reflected in the story. "The Street Singer" and "The Super" are fiction, but sprang from Eisner's memories of people he had met in the tenements of his youth. "Cookalein" was the most autobiographical—the main character "Willie" even carries Eisner's own boyhood nickname. Eisner remarked that "it took a lot of determination, a kind of courage, to write that story".
The stories' sexual content is prominent, though not in the gratuitous manner of ' celebration of hedonism, which contrasted with the conservative lifestyle of Eisner the middle-aged businessman. Eisner used no profanity in the book, and according to critic Josh Lambert the sex in Contract is not so much erotic as disturbing, the characters frustrated or filled with guilt.
"A Contract with God" In Russia, the young, deeply religious Hasidic Jew Frimme Hersh carves a contract with God on a stone tablet to live a life of good deeds; he attributes to it his later success in life. He moves to New York, into a tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue, and lives a simple life devoted to God. He adopts an infant girl, Rachele, who is abandoned on his doorstep. When she dies of a sudden illness, Hersh is infuriated, and accuses God of violating their contract. He abandons his faith, shaves his beard, and lives a life as a miserly businessman in a penthouse with a gentile mistress. He illicitly uses a synagogue's bonds that were entrusted to him to buy the tenement building in which he had lived when poor. He becomes dissatisfied with his new way of life, and decides that he needs a new contract with God to fill the emptiness he feels. He has a group of rabbis draw up a new contract, but when he returns home with it, his heart fails and he dies. A boy, Shloime, finds Hersh's old contract, and signs his own name to it. Eisner appended a page to the 2006 edition, depicting Shloime ascending the stairs to the tenement.
Eisner called the story's creation "an exercise in personal anguish" as he was still grieved and angered over his daughter Alice's death from leukemia at 16. In early sketches of the story, Eisner used her name for Hersh's adopted daughter, and expressed his own anguish through Hersh. He stated, " argument with God was 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".
"The Street Singer" Marta Maria, an aging opera singer, seduces a young man, Eddie, whom she finds singing in the alleys between tenement buildings. She had given up her own singing career for an alcoholic husband; she hopes to get back into show business as mentor to Eddie, and gives him money for clothes. He buys whiskey instead and returns to his pregnant wife, who herself had given up on show business for him and whom he abuses. He hopes to take advantage of Maria and build an actual singing career, but is unable to find the aging diva again—he does not know her address, and the tenement buildings appear all the same to him.
Eisner based the story on memories of an unemployed man who made the rounds of tenements singing "popular songs or off-key operatic operas" for spare change. Eisner remembered throwing the street singer coins on occasion, and considered he "was able to immortalize his story" in "The Street Singer".
"The Super" Those who live in the tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue fear and mistrust their antisemitic superintendent, Mr. Scuggs. The tenant Mrs. Farfell's young niece Rosie goes down to his apartment and offers him a peek at her panties for a nickel. After receiving the nickel she poisons Scuggs' dog and only companion, Hugo, and steals Scuggs's money. He corners her in an alley, where the tenants spot him and call the police, accusing him of trying to molest a minor. Before the police can break into his apartment to arrest him, he shoots himself, embracing Hugo's body.
Eisner wrote that he based the superintendent on the "mysterious but threatening custodian" of his boyhood tenement. Eisner added a page to the 2006 edition in which a "Super Wanted" sign is posted on the tenement building, following the original conclusion of Rosie counting her stolen money.
"Cookalein"
"Cookalein" is a story of tenants of 55 Dropsie Avenue vacationing in the country. To be alone with his mistress, a man named Sam sends his wife and children away to the Catskill Mountains, where they stay at a "cookalein" (Yiddish: , "cook alone", a place for boarders with access to a kitchen).
A clothing cutter named Benny and a secretary named Goldie are staying at an expensive hotel near the cookalein, both hoping to find someone rich to marry; they mistake each other for a wealthy target, and when they discover this, Benny rapes Goldie. Herbie, an intern Goldie had earlier turned down, takes her into his care, and Benny goes on to court an heiress. An older woman seduces Sam's fifteen-year-old son Willie at the cookalein; they are discovered by her husband who, after beating her, makes love to her in front of the boy.
At the end of the summer, the vacationers return to Dropsie Avenue. Goldie and Herbie are engaged, and Benny believes he will be marrying into the diamond business. Willie is affected by his experiences, but does not express them, and his family plan to leave the tenement. For the 2006 edition Eisner added an extra page of Willie from a rear-view perspective, looking out from his balcony.
"Cookalein" was the most overtly autobiographical of the stories—Eisner used the real names of his family members: his parents Sam and Fannie, his brother Petey, and himself, "Willie". Eisner called "Cookalein" "an honest account of coming of age" that was "a combination of invention and recall".
Background
Will Eisner was born in New York in 1917 to poor Jewish immigrants. He has said he wanted a career in the arts, but that poor Jews at the time were restricted from upper-class universities where he could study it. Like others of his generation, he turned to comics as an artistic outlet, a career he began in 1936. In the late 1930s he co-owned a studio which produced content for comic books; he left the studio in 1940 to produce his best-known creation, the formally inventive The Spirit, which ran as a newspaper insert from 1940 to 1952. After its end, Eisner withdrew from the comic book world and focused on the American Visuals Corporation, which he had founded in 1948 to produce educational and commercial comics and related media. With the rise of comics fandom in the 1970s, Eisner found there was still interest in his decades-old Spirit comics, and that the fans wanted more work from him. After American Visuals went out of business in 1972, Eisner entered a deal with underground comix publisher to reprint old Spirit stories. Other reprints followed, but Eisner was unwilling to do new Spirit stories—instead, he wanted to do something more serious, inspired in part by the wordless novels of Lynd Ward he first read in 1938, and similar work by the Flemish Frans Masereel and the German Otto Nückel.
Eisner had had greater artistic ambitions for comics since his time doing The Spirit. Since the 1950s, he had been developing ideas for a book, but was unable to gain support for them, as was seen by both the public and its practitioners as low-status entertainment; at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society in 1960, Rube Goldberg rebuked Eisner's ambitions, saying, "You are a vaudevillian like the rest of us ... don't ever forget that!"
With the critical acceptance of underground comix in the 1970s, Eisner saw a potential market for his ideas. In 1978, he produced his first book-length, adult-oriented work, A Contract with God. He marketed it as a "graphic novel"—a term which had been in use since the 1960s, but was little known until Eisner popularized it with Contract. Though it was a modest commercial success, Eisner was financially independent, and soon set to work on another graphic novel Life on Another Planet, and completed eighteen further graphic novels before his death in 2005; two featured the autobiographical Willie from the story "Cookalein": The Dreamer (1986) and To the Heart of the Storm (1991).
Eisner was brought up in a religious household, but himself was a reluctant disbeliever. In 1970, his sixteen-year-old daughter Alice died after an eighteen-month battle with leukemia. Eisner was enraged, and questioned how a God could let such a thing happen; he dealt with his grief by immersing himself in his work. When working on "A Contract with God", he tried to capture these emotions by acting out Frimme Hersh's character in his head.
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