Our Little Histories

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When installation artist Jenifer Greenberg-Wu is approached by Belarusian tycoon Maxim Pranovitch to create a Reality show involving “Jewish people living their Jewish lives” she takes up the challenge, calling on her Israeli relative, Nadav Markovitch and his family to move into a glass walled house where they will enact Jewish practice before an audience of spectators. Six generations earlier in a remote village in Belarus, Jennifer and Nadav’s ancestor, Raizel Shulman needs to find a way to save her three young sons from being drafted into the Czar’s army. This is the story of what happened over those six generations.​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.