Will Eisner: A Contract With God " A look at the title story"

This week I had the pleasure of reading Will Eisner’s A Contract With God. The novel contains four separate stories. The title story, A Contract With God, is truly a heartbreaking tale. The idea of a contract or a covenant between God and the Jewish people, is not a new idea by any means, in fact it is a theme that is seen over and over throughout the Hebrew Bible. What makes the contract of this story different is that it is a contract that is initiated by Frimme Hersh, the main character of the story, and not by God. In fact, it is important to note that from the point that Frimme makes this contract with God, the reader is never led to any conclusion one way or the other as to whether or not God agrees to Frimme’s terms. Never the less, after the death of Frimme’s adopted daughter Rachele, Frimme declares to God that He broke their contract, and because of this Frimme changes the way he proceeds to live his life, becoming hard and cold and greedy and less concerned with doing good works. It is this theme of "the contract" that caught my curiosity the most.

            When thinking about covenants made by God in the Hebrew Bible, immediately the story of the Flood comes to mind, and the promise that God made to never flood the world again. After I had read the story of Frimme Hersh, and as I was revisiting Eisner’s amazing illustrations, this is the covenant that came to my mind. I wonder if Eisner may have been alluding to this promise, through his images, in the very beginning of the story. Eisner tells us that on the day of Rachele’s burial, it rained quite heavily, in fact, he uses the phrase “without mercy” to explain the sheer amount of rain that fell, and we see that the streets are in fact flooding. The image of the rain falling so mercilessly, is particularly striking on Page 7, as we see the weary Frimme Hersh climbing the front stairs to the tenement. At first when I read the story, I was more intrigued by the increase in the fury of the storm when Frimme curses God for breaking their contract. It wasn’t until my second look that I was reminded that the rain had started long before Frimme argued with God. Perhaps this downpour was a reminder that God kept this promise, this agreement, to never flood the Earth and the contrast is that God made this promise, it was not a promise that man made and then God agreed to. Perhaps the story is telling us that this is not how it works. This point is perhaps made clearer towards the end of the story when Frimme attempts to create a new contract with God and dies of an assumed heart attack, at the exact moment a bolt of lightning strikes and an “angry wind swirled about the tenements.” One might conclude that the author is relaying that God could simply take no more of Frimme's demands and curses.