In 1934, during the Great Depression, elderly carpenter Jacob Shtarkah is let go from a synagogue after spending five years building a study hall for them, with no other projects and a larger donor having it named after them.
In the late winter of 1933, Elton Shaftsbury, socialite and heir to a New England factory, has lost everything in the crash of 1929 and is selling apples on street corners.
He considers suicide, but Rifka and her daughter, Rebecca, offer him a job as a “shabbas goy” to turn on their apartment lights and stove on the Sabbath.
He extorts Angelo, a carpenter and illegal immigrant who owes the Black Hand for passage into the country and who lives at the tenement, into becoming friendly with Elton to find out whenever he returns home with the bag of bonds.
Meanwhile, Moustache Pete has Marie tel him where Elton works (due to Angelo paying back the society), and has his henchman Lupo wait by the tenement to hold the runner up for his bonds.
After some correspondence, Elton uses some connections to help bring Frieda over, but Jacob finds out that he would pledge assets and take care of her, while also having to add her daughter and son-in-law as the violin grows.
However, the papers are improperly filed by staffers not wanting to redo it, and Frieda’s son in law is arrested for performing an illegal abortion while her daughter escapes.
Frieda arrives in New York by boat, and gets lodging with help from Jacob and Angelo in a tenement a block away, while giving her a job bookkeeping at the lumber yard.
By 1935, the firm, seeing the yard’s soaring profits, decide on taking it public, a proposition which would make Angelo and Jacob rich from their share ownership.
At the company, one of Pete’s goons tells him the dead body was someone snooping around their truck and accidentally delivered with they umber, who he went back to dispose of in the river.
While Willie unloads suits, Max sees one of Pete’s goons, Gino, roughing up an informant, who tells him that the dead body was a federal agent, with his badge in his pocket found when stripped.
At 55 Dropsie, Rifka is horrified as Jacob asks her for a divorce, who simply tells her, Rebecca and Elton that it was not her fault but with the children grown up, he wants something more in life, not wanting to be a “cockroach.” At the lumber yard, Angelo is working after hours when Gino, who roughs him up asking about the location of the dead man’s clothes (unaware that earlier, a local had gone through the trash can to find clothes to sell for cheap), fighting him and knocking over a space heater in the process, setting the building ablaze.
In the apartment, Elton tells the tow that the police report has the fire as accidental, so the insurance will pay out enough for them to rebuild the yard and can invest to grow it, while any evidence of their buying Pete’s hijacked lumber were destroyed, so they will not go to jail.
Everyone else leaves as Jacob stays in the apartment, when Rabbi Bensohn enters with soup for Rifka and a letter from the Jewish Agency stating that Frieda’s daughter is in Jerusalem, ill and needing financial support from her mother.
Eisner, in an introduction to the Contract With God trilogy, would state that the genesis of the book came after his 65th birthday, finding himself increasingly preoccupied with the subject and decided to face it head on with a graphic novel.