0:00
So I was growing up in this Soviet Union, kind of a Soviet Russia.
Search this video
0:00
And I cannot, now looking back, it's amazing how brainwashed I was.
0:07
It's just incredibly, in fact, what I realized how important movies are as a medium of brainwash.
0:14
I remember there was a movie in 19, maybe mid 1980s, where a guy leaves for United States and he's treated like...
0:22
This is the worst person in the world.
0:29
I remember in this movie, you can't do anything worse than that.
0:29
And so this thing's little by little shape you and also when I was, I don't know, 10, 12 years old, they would take us to movie theaters and they would show us these documentaries, which would basically portray Americans as this people without a soul, that only care about money, lynch black people and poisoned everybody with hamburgers and French fries.
0:55
And of course the hamburger story is completely true and French fries.
1:01
And so, my father has two younger sisters.
1:07
The youngest one lived in Moscow and we lived in the Murmansk. So it's far away.
1:13
So I would come to Moscow once or twice a year to see my grandparents.
1:13
And I remember, so I was born in 1973.
1:19
I remember sometime in late 1970s, for some reason my aunt disappeared and my cousins, and a six or seven year old, you kind of don't think about it.
1:27
But then at some point you ask question, where are they?
1:31
And my parents said, "Well, she moved to Siberia.
1:31
They couldn't find a job here.
1:36
They moved to Siberia and it's very far away, that's why we don't see them."
1:40
And as a young mind, you were like, okay, your parents tell this, that's true.
1:44
Fast forward to 1988 or 1989, the Berlin Wall already kind of broken down, maybe either coming down or already came down, I think.
1:51
And I just watched the movie, I just referred to, I just watched it maybe recently, it's still fresh in my head.
1:57
And my father tells me, "You know, we told you about your aunt who lives in Siberia?" I'm like, "Yeah."
2:03
She's like, "Well, she's not in Siberia. She's in United States."
2:06
And the first innate emotion, the reaction is, she's a traitor.
2:13
This is my aunt, my father's sister. I know her parents.
2:13
And that is the first thought that came to me.
2:19
And then my father said, "Well, listen, she lived in 1979." And what happened was...
2:25
And this is very typical story of Russian Jews at the time.
2:25
So you couldn't really leave Russia to go for United States.
2:32
There was impossibility, but the Russia would allow you to immigrate to Israel.
2:38
So a lot of Russians, what they would do, they would get in the plane.
2:44
And luckily there was no direct flight and maybe there was, but I don't think there was direct flight to Israel, but there were direct flights to a lot of European cities.
2:50
So what they would do, they would fly to Vienna or Rome, this is where most immigrants went and they would show up to American embassy and say, "Well, we were going to Israel, but really wanted to come to United States."
3:05
And I think there was some American legislature that made that very, very simple.
3:05
And she ended up in Brooklyn.
3:12
And like when you watch Moscow on the Hudson, that kind of describing your life.
3:20
And what was interesting about this, I just mentioned Moscow on the Hudson.
3:20
I remember when I watched Moscow on the Hudson for the first time.
3:26
And I want you to picture this, imagine a huge apartment building, huge, that has maybe, I don't know, hundreds maybe thousands of apartments.
3:38
And then in the basement, it has a very large space.
3:38
And what people would do, this is like 1980s, now late eighties, they would basically take VCR and connect, maybe several TVs to it.
3:51
And they would play American movies dubbed into Russian.
3:51
And this became our cinema.
3:51
So if you wanted to watch new American movies, if you wanted to watch Rambo, if you wanted to watch whatever Schwarzenegger and Stallone were huge then, or if you wanted to watch Moscow on the Hudson, that's where you would watch it because they would not show it in the movie theater.
4:09
And of course, every single voice there was, the same person played all the parts. It didn't matter.
4:12
And the quality was horrible and everything, but these kind of underground movie theaters changed our perception of what America was.
4:24
Now, this is very interesting. What you don't realize.
4:30
Most American movies are kind of shot on the coasts, either New York or Hollywood or Los Angeles, somewhere there.
4:35
So what was my perception of America?
4:35
Skyscrapers or Palm trees.
4:43
And then so, this is 1991. My aunt invites us.
4:43
So this point I'm already embraced America.
4:51
And my family is coming to America.
4:51
And our trip actually was a, you know most immigrant story has this drama?
4:58
Our story has the opposite of version of this because when we flew from Frankfurt to New York, I think Pan Am, there was a Pan Am flight.
5:03
They oversold economy class.
5:10
So flew first class- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
5:14
Vitaliy Katsenelson: To reach the United States, but anyway, you arrive to Denver and I have this incredible shock.
5:20
First number one, we just came from Moscow, and in Moscow it was incredibly cold. It's like insanely cold.
5:27
We land in Denver in December 3rd or 4th, whatever.
5:27
And it's 70 something degrees, everybody's wearing shorts, which is a shock because that's [inaudible] But, I look around and this is kind of average, typical America.
5:40
Very little, very few skyscrapers, maybe in downtown, which you don't see at first, just a lot of filet buildings.
5:45
There's a lot of three, four story buildings.
5:49
And that was a shock too.
5:49
So anyways, so that's my coming to America story a little bit.