OUR LITTLE HISTORIES

In an impoverished village in White Russia, Raizel Shulman needs to find a way to save her three young sons from being drafted into the Czar’s army. Before splitting them up forever, she pens a poem with three short verses. A different fate awaits the descendants of each, as one branch will immigrate to America, a second will leave for Palestine, and a third will perish in the Shoah. Through it all, the poem accompanies them, a silent, mysterious token from a place now lost in time.

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In seven episodes, moving backwards through the tumult of the 19th and 20th centuries, Raziel’s descendants make fateful choices as they struggle to reconcile their identity, their dreams and the constraints of their time and place. Their stories play out on a reality set in rural Belarus, 1960’s Tel Aviv, a pre-independence kibbutz, 1930’s Chicago, pre-war Vilna, turn of the century Minsk, and finally, to the tiny shtetl of Prepoisk, not as a single overriding narrative, but as a collection of small, intimate histories.