Charlap: 1894, Bransk - The prologue or pilot starts with Reb Yaakov Charlap teaching Cheder to boys, then leaving his job and going to his house where he's met by all eleven of his sons, all of whom are now Bar Mitzvahed and teenagers, his wife (probably unnamed) having had four sets of triplets. They do a l'chaim, and Reb Yaakov explains that an angel appeared to him in a dream, and that so long as he named his children after the twelve tribes of Israel, Hashem would bless his house. He has a rich twin brother in Warsaw who sends them lots of money but notes in his speech that he wishes his brother was here for this day but they haven't seen each other in ten years because his wife doesn't like Reb Yaakov. He tells them that after Shabbos, the shatkhan will be coming with matches for all of you. Very soon you will all be married and have kinder of your own, this is going to be a year of Simcheh. The eleven brothers drink with Reb Yaakov and they start making plans for the bris. They talk about the first events in the Dreyfus affair. It has been more than thirteen years since the mother had Yosef, Dinah, and Zevulun, but a Warsaw doctor brought by Yaakov's brother warned that he would endanger the health of the mother if they ever had another child. At the birth of Benyamin, the mother dies, and it causes a bitter fight among the children with their father who said that Reb Yaakov endangered their mother. A few minutes later, they get a letter from Yaakov's sister-in-law that the brother in Warsaw died, and the payments must stop immediately. The family knows they must break apart. It ends with a mini-pseudo sermon from the father lamenting that he knows that most of the children will cease to be Jewish, will be answered by others.
Shimon: 1902, South Africa - about the Second Boer War: British and the guerrillas and why the Boer guerrillas care much more than the British do, but also why the British imperialism may be more benevolent than Boer imperialism, but maybe worse because it is much further reaching. Shimon (Simon) is an officer at a concentration camp. The commandant is an aristocrat whose father was from an old Portuguese Jewish family (possibly also named Charlap). We hear the British interacting with the Boers but we do not meet the Boers. The other officers are from all around the British empire, we meet them either in the mess hall or over a game of cards. Simon has to interrogate a Boer prisoner, who argues with him that the British are no better than the Boers and just want the blood diamonds. And eventually rather than wear the Boer down, the Boer wears him down because the Boer realizes that he's Jewish and tells him he'll never be British, and the non-violent supposedly principled British interrogation Shimon kills him. Ends with motivational speech from Commandant telling him he knows exactly what happened without having to read any report. Don't worry, here you're an Englishman, not a Jew, but ends on a not of ambiguity that Simon is not sure he wants to be English. "He fell off a wall, accidental circumstances. This never happened. You're an Englishman now."
Judah and Zebulun: 1903, Basel - Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, the motion to have a Jewish state in Uganda. We meet Theodore Herzl who hates his most passionate followers. We hear Herzl over the phone with some famous Jewish businessman, perhaps Nathaniel Rothschild, perhaps Karl Wittgenstein, is idolized by the people he The Kishnev pogrom is in the minds of everybody and what might soon happen elsewhere around Russia and Europe. Judah is a law student who clerked at a Jewish firm in Kishnev, dutiful and circumspect, Zebulun is the firm's errand boy, rebellious and wayward. They are there because their firm's boss was killed in the pogrom and need to make connections or find work. Judah's real hope is to work for Herzl. He waits in line for days and days for an audience, which of course he doesn't get. Zebulun is not interested at all in anything about the conference or Basel, but he ends up drinking in a Basel inn and unwittingly ends up talking and getting drunk with Chaim Weizmann while having no idea who Weizmann is. Weizmann drunkenly tells the young man about his problems convincing Arthur Balfour to let Jews have a state in Palestine, to which Zebulun replies 'Would he give up London to live in Canada?" Weizmann immediately realizes this is the argument he needs to use, and Zebulun, suddenly impressed that he can be useful to someone, becomes so committed a Zionist that out of enthusiasm, Zebulun becomes the one who stands up in the convention and leads the chant of 'Am Yisroel Chai' which leads to the adaptation of Palestine as the only possible home for a Jewish state.
Reuven: 1904, Odessa - Reuven ends up servant in urban palace of a Russian Count who is a general in the army. At the palace, Reuven is Roman, and tries to conceal from the staff that he is Jewish, but a person on the staff runs into him on his way to his apartment which he shares with Gad, who is a student, and sees that he is Jewish. So he blackmails him. But the Count grows to like his footman, thinking him very competent and funny. The house is preparing for Leo Tolstoy to come, and they have to take extra care to accommodate Tolstoy's eccentricities. When Tolstoy comes, he can't care less about the noblemen and wants to spend all his time with the servants rather than the masters, and his extremely personal questions make the servants deeply uncomfortable. In front of the entire dinner, Tolstoy puts Roman on the spot and asks him his life story. Reuven can't help it at this point and has to confess the whole thing. Upon hearing that Reuven is Jewish, Tolstoy sermonizes about the importance of tolerance, but the other servants are antisemitic, and in the kitchen one deliberately drops hot soup on his hand, scalding him. The Count sends for Reuven, and Reuven and the other servant expect for him to be fired, but the Count promotes him to head of the house because the Count too has a terrible secret. When the count asks what happened to his hand, he has to lie about why. 'I sent for you because you BOZHE MOY WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HAND! (Reuven lies). I sent for you Jew because you have a terrible secret, and I must tell someone my terrible secret.' The Count confesses to him about the plans for the Russo-Japanese War and how it will be a disaster that kills tens of thousands, but the Czar's word is law. 'You must count yourself fortunate that I know you're a Jew. If it were not known, you would come as my personal valet, and you would die along with everyone else.' It ends with the aristocrat leaving for it with one of the crucial commands, but knowing he will die and his men will be slaughtered.
Gad: 1905, Odessa - Gad, a communist, still lives with Reuven, who is now working as butler for a middle class Jewish family who owns a factory. Gad is a university student who never goes to class, and instead he is a street organizer who unknown to Reuven is using his his brother to get intelligence on the family's business practices to use against them to help the workers. From Bund meetings he has an unserious girlfriend who tells him she's pregnant and they need to get married, she comes up to him multiple times over the course of the episode, and each time he explains marriage is a bourgeois capitalist institution and he uses institutional jargon to get out of it, and then announces he's leaving her and convinces her that it's because she's insufficiently committed to the revolution. Gad should seem like a schmuck, a filthy character who betrays everybody, but then he goes a 1905 revolutionary protest, the army fires on the protestors and Gad behaves like a hero who saves multiple lives.
Yosef: 1907 - Ellis Island: Starts with guy Yosef got to know on the boat throwing his tefilin overboard 'Don't you understand? In Amerikeh we get to be what we want and we don't have to do nothin' no more.' Yosef and his wife and children (Menashe and Ephraim of course) get off the boat at Ellis Island and through them we take the audience through the exact process of immigration at Ellis Island.
Yosef: 1908 - Lower East Side: Takes us through the realities of tenement housing. Working in a sweatshop. Having to work on shabbos, being unable to afford kosher food and generally being unable to eat many days. Yosef is a short tempered father whom the kids are intimidated to contradict. He stays home for Shabbos, not believing the injunction of acquaintances that Shabbos doesn't exist in the American workplace. The boss clearly knew what was happening and says to him: "I know what you think we're going to allow you to do, and you get it just this once. But if you ever don't come to work on Saturday again, don't come in Monday either." Yosef's wife, pregnant with a third child, prays for her husband to find work without desecrating shabbos and Yom Tov. The neighbors have a good job and can keep shabbos and she goes over to their house and brings the kids, Yosef goes apoplectic because they are supposed to spend it only with themselves. "But you're not here. What should I do?" "What you would do if I was here. You keep a proper heym and you machine de Shabbos fa dem without me!' She tries to make Shabbos without him, the kids behave badly, she tries yelling and they don't stop, they leave the table and start chasing each other around the apartment. She breaks down and cries.
Yosef: 1909 - Yosef organizes a union of garment workers, organizes a strike and the day they're supposed to strike management comes out and agrees to his concessions. He's immediately called into the front office, he's expecting to be fired or arrested, and he is asked to take a promotion to foreman. "You're clearly a leader and people listen to you!" He takes a day to think about it. Knowing that he'd be asked to make excuses for new company policies, he absolutely doesn't want to do it, but his wife, taking care of a sick baby Maishe, is livid that he wouldn't have taken the position immediately because they might change their mind by tomorrow: 'It has extra pay and extra naches! Would you have to do the dangerous stuff anymore?" "No!" He goes into work the next day fully expecting to take the meeting, but the moment before he comes in, he's flagged down by Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America head Sidney Hillman from Chicago who was in town and heard about the strike, who tells him that they probably offered him a promotion immediately, but instead he and his coworkers form a New York branch for themselves of the ACWA and they would get protection and negotiations done by the national office. The threat of violence is also implied if he doesn't agree to Hillman's demands. He accedes, Hilliman comes with him and makes an impromptu speech to the workers in his sweatshop in front of the management which tries to call the police, but the police ..... needs ending
Yosef's Wife: 1911 - Greenwich Village: Budgets are tight, so Yosef's wife gets a job working at a shirt factory in Greenwich Village. She gains a sense of self-respect and competence that she never had from being a homemaker. But she turns out to be working during the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and dies after she jumps from the window to avoid burning and dies in the fall. Her dead body is on the front page of every paper in America. At the shiva house, Yosef is approached by both Sidney Hillman o try to become a poster boy for the union movement and talk to journalists about his wife. Yosef is extremely reluctant to be used in that way, and says no. Hillman sends the journalist anyway, and of course, Yosef breaks down as he tells about his wife. The journalist refers to Yosef Kharlap in the paper as Joseph Charlap.
Menashe and Ephraim: 1912 - Borough Park. Yosef's children are about to get Bar Mitzvahed, they both go to public school rather than Yeshiva because Yosef wants them to get a better education. They both hate Judaism and resent Yosef's insistence on shul and davening and keeping Shabbos, trying to break away and play baseball with neighborhood kids. The key being to jump over the neighborhood fence when Yosef is coming. Menashe is very athletic so has little trouble avoiding it, Ephraim, shorter and pudgier, can't jump the fence, so he has to always accompany his Dad to shul. Menashe starts hanging out with neighborhood toughs, whereas Ephraim starts reading. It ends with them all sitting around on Friday night and Yosef telling stories about the Old Country.
Zevulun: 1912, Constantinople - The Yeshiva slacker Zevulun, much more confident now and to everybody's shock a macher in the Zionism movement, gets to know David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi who seek him out because of Weizmann's recommendation. Judah is now his errand boy. But he also gets to know a Sephardic souk dealer and his daughter and their whole family and realizes he truly belongs with the Sephardim. The son/brother of this family is graduating from a French school and has contempt for his father's backward ways, he is moving to Paris and is getting loopholed into taking French citizenship, which implies that he will soon fight in WWI, but Zevulun sees in this holistic worldview a completeness and sense of belonging that he's always missed and also sees in the Sephardic brother his own struggles of finding his place in a world that's grown too big, and wishes he could live in a much smaller world. The uptight, hard working, and unable to catch a break Judah bristles at this worldview, but Zevulun realizes that it's Judah who is the truly belongs at Ben-Gurion's side, and sneakily finds a way to ingratiate Judah to Ben-Gurion.
"Don't you have love songs in Poland?"
"No. But we have lots of songs about how love doesn't work out."
Menashe and Ephraim: 1913, Borough Park - Menashe and Ephraim have to contend with a neighborhood Irish gang which beats them up for being Jews. One of them pulls out a knife and says that if they don't give bring them all their Jew money next time, he's going to use the knife on them. We go into the violent Irish house of that gang member, with an unemployed abusive alcoholic father who after beating his family up, breaks down in tears and blames Jews for taking a job that is rightfully his.
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