It’s 1850 Belarus, a few days before Hanukah and Raizel Shulman is experiencing recurring nightmares. Her three sons are in mortal danger. Isser, the czar’s appointed deputy will arrive any day to fill the required quota of boys for the czar’s army. Save for three exceptions – paying sacksfuls of money, subjugation to physical mutilation or hiding in the deep forest--- Raizel’s sons will be next to feed the czar’s maw. Her husband urges her to leave their boys “in the hands of G-d.” But Raizel does the unimaginable. She gives them away, each clutching one stanza of a poem as a parting gift.
Our Little Histories, by Israeli author Janice Weizman opens in Chicago 2015. Far, removed from traditional Judaism, Jennifer Greenberg-Wu and teenaged daughter Cassie---accessorized with “an oversized crucifix around her neck,” are packing to travel to Belarus. Their destination is Slawharad, a village near Minsk where Jennifer, a respected museum curator, was invited to create a “Living Installation “meant to represent Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement. The project will be a reality show similar to TV’s Big Brother. Greenberg’s objective is having visitors witness (rather than describe) the cultural customs and practices of Jewish life enacted before a live audience in real time.
With the promise of generous compensation Greenberg-Wu enlists her religious, Israeli cousin Nadav, his wife Miri and daughter Batya to participate in the two- week project. The “show” would run twice daily, Shabbat excluded. Jennifer spares no detail to assure the authenticity of her installation. As one of hundreds of props Jennifer places an old Yiddish journal on the “set.” Cousin Nadav recognizes the identical journal was given to him by his grandmother, Tamar, when she lived on a kibbutz way back in the fifties. Another copy is in the possession of a cousin in Lithuania. Of particular interest inside the journal is a cryptic poem. Neither Jennifer nor Nadav can decipher its Yiddish meaning.
As the story unfolds Jennifer discovers the poem connects three brothers each with a different surname each on a journey that takes them far from their home in 19th century Pale of Settlement. Written in receding time-lines going back to Propoisk 1890, each chapter in the book vividly portrays a “little history” of Jewish survival within three branches of one family and the changes in Jewish life over 6 generations of their descendants. We learn what it means to be a Jew in Chicago in 2015, in Tel Aviv in 1968, on a kibbutz in Israel in 1946, in Vilna 1939 and in a tiny shtetel in Propoisk in 1850.
A remarkable story that reawakens the core values of Judaism and its many iterations and renewal from generation to generation.