Mer­ryl Gold­berg is a pro­fes­sor of music and a found­ing mem­ber of the Klezmer Con­ser­va­to­ry Band, one of the pio­neer­ing ensem­bles in the revival of the tra­di­tion­al music of East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ry. In 1985, she and three of her fel­low band mem­bers (Han­kus Net­sky, Jeff Warschauer, and Ros­alie Gerut) were approached by the Boston-based group Action for Sovi­et Jew­ry to under­take a mis­sion to vis­it refuseniks in the Sovi­et Union. Their aim was to keep open chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tions to those who had applied to leave the USSR and had been refused per­mis­sion. In many cas­es, the refuseniks had been sub­ject­ed to harass­ment, job loss, and even impris­on­ment for their attempts to get out. Now, forty years lat­er, Gold­berg (with coau­thor Vince Houghton, an expert on espi­onage) gives a live­ly and upbeat account of the band’s remark­able expe­ri­ence in the USSR. 

Key to the suc­cess of their mis­sion would be the group’s abil­i­ty to find a way to car­ry infor­ma­tion to the USSR, such as the refuseniks’ names, address­es, etc., and to take back with them details of oth­er refuseniks and sto­ries of their sit­u­a­tion — all of which they want­ed to hide from Sovi­et author­i­ties. To this end, Gold­berg (and per­haps Warschauer — their mem­o­ries vary) came up with an inge­nious sys­tem of using music nota­tion to encode their infor­ma­tion. Their sys­tem worked when sev­er­al times dur­ing their trip they were inter­ro­gat­ed by KGB agents who searched though their belong­ings and gave only cur­so­ry atten­tion to their music man­u­script books.

The mis­sion was shad­owed by Sovi­et secret police from the out­set. The author­i­ties were skep­ti­cal that these four musi­cians (car­ry­ing instru­ments as well as suit­cas­es full of gifts and med­i­cines for the refuseniks) were, in fact, just tourists. (Some­one in the trav­el agency that had booked the tour may have been a secret agent for the KGB and alert­ed the author­i­ties to the real nature of the trip.) In any event, the group tried to keep up the pre­tense for a few days while vis­it­ing Moscow, but when they flew to Tbil­isi, in Sovi­et Geor­gia, they went all out to find a group of refuseniks there who per­formed under the name of the Phan­tom Orches­tra, all the while being watched by agents of the KGB. After spend­ing two music-filled evenings with the Phan­toms, the group set out for Sovi­et Arme­nia to find oth­er refuseniks, but the author­i­ties clamped down and expelled the group.

Gold­berg nar­rates the account in a casu­al, col­lo­qui­al voice and presents some of their adven­ture and mis­ad­ven­tures as almost comedic (as they try to out­wit their ever-present shad­ows). But under­neath the some­times light­heart­ed tone is a seri­ous tale of real dan­gers for the group and for the refuseniks they vis­it­ed. Sev­er­al of the lat­ter wound up in prison fol­low­ing their vis­it before being allowed to emi­grate when Sovi­et pol­i­cy changed under Gorbachev. 

In the long term, the move­ment to free Sovi­et Jews suc­ceed­ed in per­mit­ting sev­er­al mil­lion to emi­grate. This book is a tes­ta­ment to the resilience of those who faced state oppres­sion in order to aid Sovi­et Jews.