Customer Reviews

To the Heart of the Storm (Will Eisner Library)

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I just read this book and I can see why Will Eisner is one of the greatest cartoonists around. Framed by Will's train ride when he is drafted for WWII, it tells the stories of his Jewish family.

Without rubbing your face in it, Will Eisner repeatedly shows you prejudices he encountered while growing up and while listening to his parents talk about their lives. There's a natural emphasis on anti-Semitism but other attitudes (anti-Catholic, "those German Jews are so stuck up", etc.) are also shown.

All that aside, it was also a fascinating story and showed something about what life was like from the late 19th century to 1942 - a year when neither of my parents had yet been born.

I would recommend this book to those who like graphic novels, anyone who liked Maus, and anyone who likes the oral history of Studs Terkel. Also, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in European and American politics of the first half of this century - for a viewpoint ! that doesn't often make it into history textbooks.

Will Eisner tells a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of the anti-Semitic attitudes that lurked in the U.S. even as America headed off to war against the Nazis in Europe. (Though it's never stated in this book, the only *official* aid the U.S. gave German Jews was to let about a thousand immigrate here during the war. Everything else came afterward.)

Through the eyes of a son headed to war, we see his upbringing in various New York neighborhoods, and his parents' struggles to make ends meet in an economy where, even more than today, ethnicity could mean the difference between success and failure. His parents' tales show that things have been even worse in the past, though; from an uncle on his mother's side who changed his religion and cut himself off from the family to get into medical school, to his father's encounters in pre-WWI Vienna with a pro-Nazi artist.

Maybe the most compelling and heartbreaking thread, however, is the relationship between Willie and his best friend, Duke. From a backyard fight, through a building project, and then a meeting as adults, we see the harsh reality of how things so often work out, but also the hope for what can be... and why an artist, just starting in his career, might make the decision to not fight his draft notice and risk losing it all.

Brilliant stuff that warms the heart even as it sometimes hits like a knife in the back. Eisner is at his best here in art, in writing, and in storytelling.

Eisner presents broad, varied, and highly personal view of the American Jewish experience. It has to be varied since there is no one experience. Each differs from all the others, and each contains many parts at odds with each other.

This time, Eisner starts his story on a troop train, one leg of the trip towards the storm of WWII. One character sits silently, gazing out the window. Although he never speaks or even moves, his story plays out as fragments of memory, triggered by each tenement, housewife, or children's game seen through the window.

As such, there's no one linear thread of narrative. Parts take place before immigration from Europe, or the Depression, or the book's 1940s here-and-now. Fragments come from adult life, a child's experience, or an adolescent's ventures into friendship and love. Some parts represent the shared experience of any immigrant, balancing an insular "our kind" mentality against melding into the larger culture. Others display the range of distinctly Jewish experience, with features as subtle as a kind of anti-Semitism directed against one Jewish group by another.

Eisner's graphic novels have led pictorial story-telling out of the "just comics" phase and into real literature. His somewhat cartoony visual style might look unsophisticated to today's media-soaked eye. If any other author tried it, the graphic style wouldn't do much for me. The story is what matters in Eisner's work. It's the kind of fiction that doesn't need to be literally true in its facts to be deeply, personally, and sometimes brutally honest.

-- wiredweird