NOTES OF DECEPTION

An American musician tells of her 1985 visit to the Soviet Union to contact “refuseniks.”

Goldberg was a student at New England Conservatory of Music when she joined the Klezmer Conservatory Band, a group playing traditional Jewish dance music that originated in Eastern Europe. Four members of the group, after learning of the plight of Soviet Jews who had been denied the right to emigrate, decided to form a quartet to tour the Soviet Union and connect with the refuseniks. The point of the tour was to allow the stranded Jews (and other dissidents) to connect with their American allies while publicizing their plight. To gather information about the Soviet musicians—while concealing it from the KGB—Goldberg devised a musical code system with each note in a written melody representing a letter of the alphabet. The book tells of the Americans’ visits with the refuseniks and interaction with the Soviet system. A highlight was performing with the Phantom Orchestra of Tbilisi, Georgia—a group of refuseniks and dissidents, including many professional musicians. Their encounters with the KGB, which followed them everywhere and often interrogated them, finally resulted in their deportation for associating with “negative people.” But despite regular searches of the klezmer band’s belongings, the KGB never solved the musical code—which, years later, became of interest to the cybersecurity community. The quartet’s experiences paled in comparison to what Soviet citizens faced: “[We] realized the searches, interrogations, and prison were a constant reality for these people,” Goldberg writes. The book’s final chapters recount their post-tour experiences, including the eventual emigration of many of the refuseniks to the U.S. or Israel.

An inspiring story of four determined people using music to establish human contact and fight oppression.