Also Read: 'An American Pickle': Seth Rogen Falls Into a Vat of Pickles and Meets His Own Great-Grandson in HBO Max Trailer (Video)It opens in 1919, in black and white and in the fictional Eastern European country of Schlupsk, where Herschel Greenbaum is a ditch digger whose shovel keeps breaking and whose wildest dream is to one day be able to afford seltzer water.