Memory Lane Up Front Edition

• Published in: The Jerusalem post
• Main Author: Max, Danielle
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Jerusalem The Jerusalem Post Ltd 20.01.2006
• Subjects: Hersh, Frimme

It is this constant struggle to survive that [Eisner] portrays so adeptly. A Contract with God consists of a quartet of interwoven stories. The eponymous first story tells the heartbreaking tale of the pious Jew, Frimme Hersh, who loses his only daughter, makes and breaks a covenant with God and ends up as a Dropsie Avenue slumlord. The tenement at Number 55 is also the scene for two of the other stories in the novel, including "The Street Singer and The Super," which involves a little girl called Rosie who poisons the dreaded super's dog before bumping off the super himself. In the final tale, "Cookalein," the inhabitants of the tenement decamp to a summer bungalow resort in the Catskill Mountains where things are not always as they seem. In the opening of the trilogy, Eisner, ever the graphic witness, recalls tenement life. "Within its walls great dramas played out," he writes. "There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witnesses like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business." With his three Dropsie Avenue novels, Eisner has recreated these feelings and this existence for a new generation who live far removed from tenement life.