On the day of the wedding of Meyer Levy’s beautiful daughter, Sarah, a pogrom will take place, in which scores of Jews will be bludgeoned and hacked to death, their women raped, their babies’ brains dashed out. Of Meyer’s ten children, six will be killed, along with his first grandchild and his wife. As he lays dying, he will make arrangements for his four remaining children. They will be scattered to the four corners of the earth, each of them charged by Reb Meyer with his vision of the mission of the Jew: to spread love where there is hatred, and light where there is darkness. “If we were chosen for anything at all,” he says, “it is for that.”
The journey to fulfill that mission will be a long and tortuous one, for each of his four remaining children. And, through their eyes, we will see one of the most tumultuous eras in human history. They will be not only witnesses to history but makers of it. Through their eyes, we will tell the story of the 20th century; its hope, its despair, its barbarism, its nobility… On four different continents… Through love and war, intrigue, idealism turned into a nightmare, and nightmare reborn into hope and courage.
We will see the noblest of intentions metamorphose into inhumanity on a scale never before imagined. We will see the rise and fall of what was to be the paradise of workers. Empires that would last a thousand years. The democratic end of feudal dynasties dissolved into civil war. We will see a language and a land and, indeed, a people pronounced dead a thousand times over, become the living embodiment of the vision of the Valley of Dry Bones coming back to life, only to be enmeshed in the struggle of two peoples for one small plot of land which has the curse of being deemed holy by three religions; holy enough to live for… Holy enough to die for… Holy enough to kill for; blessing and curse. Heaven and Hell on earth. Darkness pierced by the light. And, in the midst of age-old hatreds, the undying hope of love, played out on a worldwide stage, soaked in blood, bathed in glory, inflamed by passion, debased by power and ennobled by the spark of the divine carried in the DNA of the human spirit.
