Weaponized immigrants, zombie films: an interview
A few months ago I was interviewed by Will McDonald about my ongoing attempts to write my weaponized immigrant memoir, The Soviet Jew. The interview finally made it to print in this month’s issue of the Brooklyn Rail.
We eventually do get around to talking about my immigration and Soviet immigrant literature, but we start off by discussing the trip I took to Russia last autumn and the Soviet horror movie I’ve been helping Evgenia produce.
Check it out:
Will McDonald (Rail): The past couple months have been chaotic for you and your family. You were in Russia at the time the mobilization and conscriptions began and were part of the mad dash to the border along with thousands of others.
Yasha Levine: Yeah, we went to Russia in September because—well, for two reasons—my wife, Evgenia, has family there—elderly relatives she hasn’t seen since before the pandemic began and wasn’t sure if she’d ever see them again—so that was one reason we wanted to go. We actually were planning to go around this time before this whole horrible war broke out. Before Russia invaded Ukraine and Putin decided to do this stupid thing that he did.
The other reason was because Evgenia and I had written this script a few years ago. It’s called Inheritance. The best way to describe it is a kind of Soviet zombie film set in Moscow, a film that’s on a very deep level about the collapse of the USSR and Putin’s elite. Before the war broke out, Evgenia’s plan was to start laying the groundwork for shooting it. The invasion pretty much put an end to that. Still, we wanted to see if there was maybe a tiny chance it would be possible to shoot this film — this very indie zombie film — on the sly somewhere in the countryside. Things in Ukraine were obviously bad, but in Russia people were still going about their lives, so we wanted to go and see for ourselves what the situation was like.
Well, we found out. Our trip was cut short because of the sudden mobilization order that Putin gave. And so there was a huge panic, and people fled for the closest border. We got out through the land border with Estonia, and then caught a ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki and got a flight to Rome. Somewhere between leaving Russia and arriving in Finland, we caught COVID, because you can’t really protect yourself in these crowded border stations, on a bus packed with people or a ferry packed with people. So, with COVID layered onto everything else, it was a pretty grim trip.
Rail: Obviously different circumstances, but doesn’t this trip feel strangely similar to your first escape from the Soviet Union as a kid…
Read the rest over at Brooklyn Rail.
—Yasha Levine
PS: Will is a writer and comedian. Check out Will’s work here and here.