I don’t need to remind anyone that 2020 was a strange year. Some of the stuck-at-home taught themselves to bake sourdough. Others took up knitting. Many spent an extra hour per week waiting in socially-distanced queues outside grocery stores.

Me? I wrote a 159-page audio drama script about Holocaust victims rising from mass graves as zombies, whose trailer we released this week.

Before you get offended, let me explain.

One month after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, The Canadian Jewish News—at least for a time—closed up shop. But it wasn’t long after the old familiar weekly newspaper shut down that a core group of former employees, myself included, began discussions about reviving The CJN in a newer, bolder, digital-first format, focusing on deep research and innovative storytelling.

I was charged with spearheading the nascent podcast department. And since The CJN would take a few months to get back on its feet, and the pandemic ensured I had ample spare time, I did something I hadn’t tried in a decade: creative writing.

I began with a concept that felt fittingly eyebrow-raising for The New CJN: Holocaust victims rising as zombies. (No, I don’t know where the idea came from, or why nobody had come up with it before, really.) The plot, which takes place in the near future, centres on a young Canadian woman, Kat, undergoing a quarter-life crisis; she drops out of university to travel to Germany and meet her late Jewish father’s estranged family. There, she accompanies her cousins to visit a nearby concentration camp, where news reports have alleged graverobbing vandals were digging up the mass graves of Holocaust victims. Kat and her cousins are among the first to learn the truth: it isn’t graverobbers disturbing these burial sites, but zombies emerging out of them. After one of the undead seems inexplicably drawn to Kat and her family, they realize he’s docile and curious. The group decides to uncover the truth behind the phenomenon and fend off attempts by bad-faith outsiders trying........

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