![\"CARLSBAD,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sut-l-local-author08.jpg\")
Goldberg goes through a mixture of articles and photographs of her time in Russia while at her home in Carlsbad on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. (Hayne Palmour IV \/ For The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\nBack in 1985 in the Soviet Union, Merryl Goldberg was interrogated by the KGB three times, briefly kidnapped by the state security agency twice and put under house arrest once.<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll tell you it was worth it.<\/p>\n
Today, Goldberg lives in Carlsbad and works at California State University San Marcos, where she\u2019s a professor of music. But 41 years ago, she was a 26-year-old saxophone player tasked with a secret mission behind the Iron Curtain.<\/p>\n
She and three bandmates from the Klezmer Conservatory Band in Boston, which performs traditional Yiddish\u00a0and Jewish music, were set to meet and perform with refuseniks \u2014 Soviet citizens, mainly Jews, so named because they had been denied the right to emigrate.<\/p>\n
It was no small job to visit refuseniks. The Soviet regime saw them as enemies of the state and, believing they would reveal state secrets, prohibited them from the leaving the country. Their restricted status turned many into dissenters and activists, often tailed by the KGB and getting their phone lines cut in an effort to keep their stories quiet.<\/p>\n
If the KGB knew what Goldberg\u2019s bandmates were doing, they could be deported \u2014 or worse.<\/p>\n
So in classic spy fashion, the group devised secret codes to communicate with one another, hidden in plain sight, so the KGB would be none the wiser \u2014 using series of notes embedded in their sheet music.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made a nice little ensemble,\u201d Goldberg said of the band. \u201cThe caveat is we had to do all of this in secret. We couldn\u2019t tell anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a wild tale, one that Goldberg recounts in a new book, \u201cNotes of Deception,\u201d she co-wrote with Vince Houghton, the director of the National Security Agency\u2019s National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. It\u2019s set to publish Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Goldberg goes through a mixture of articles and photographs of her time in Russia while at her home in Carlsbad on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. (Hayne Palmour IV \/ For The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
Over 10 days in May of 1985, Goldberg and her bandmates \u2014 Rosalie Gerut, Hankus Netsky and Jeffrey Warschauer \u2014 traveled across the Soviet Union, meeting and sharing music with the refuseniks. Along the way, they were followed and questioned by KGB agents, were often separated from each other and slept in bugged hotel rooms.<\/p>\n
In an effort to be as inconspicuous as possible, the musicians didn\u2019t write anything down. Instead, the names of people they planned to meet, addresses and other important details were all hidden in the code of the music, its notes, chords and other symbols corresponding to letters of the alphabet.<\/p>\n
When the KGB questioned the group and searched their belongings time and again, the officers had no idea what they were looking at, Goldberg recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven a musician wouldn\u2019t know that it was coded because it looked like 20th century music,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
As the group learned the stories of the people they met, they encoded that into their music, too \u2014 ultimately smuggling it out of the country. And when they returned to the U.S., they shared their stories with the public \u2014 meeting with journalists who wrote about the refuseniks, and collaborating with advocates who encouraged people to urge their elected officials to act.<\/p>\n
They held a concert and press conference on Capitol Hill with a congressional caucus, and they met with then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, who advocated for refuseniks and ultimately helped a family the band met in the Soviet Union emigrate.<\/p>\n
![\"CARLSBAD,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sut-l-local-author06.jpg\")
Goldberg holds a picture of herself, second from left, and three fellow musicians \u2014 from left, Jeff Warschauer, Rosalie Gerut and Hankus Netsky \u2014 performing together in Russia while at her home in Carlsbad on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. (Hayne Palmour IV \/ For The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
The trip and their advocacy were\u00a0part of a growing movement of advocacy for refuseniks, building on nearly two decades of organized campaigns by groups such as the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.<\/p>\n
The year Goldberg and her bandmates made their trip, hopes for progress were already rising. As Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet premier and promised new openness with a policy of glasnost, a slow thaw would begin toward free speech, human rights, the release of political dissidents and relaxed restrictions on emigration.<\/p>\n
But that process would take years, and during the musicians\u2019 time in the Soviet Union in 1985, Goldberg says they were bolstered by the refuseniks and their resistance against the regime.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were egged on by the people we met, who were so brave,\u201d Goldberg said. \u201cThe courage and the confidence that they gave us, and the amazing spirit that they had.\u201d<\/p>\n
To some degree, Goldberg\u2019s knack for the work ran in the family \u2014 her father was an intelligence agent for the U.S. Army while stationed in Korea during the Korean War.<\/p>\n
But her enthusiasm for the entire trip went deeper.<\/p>\n
![\"CARLSBAD,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/sut-l-local-author11.jpg\")
Author and musician Merryl Goldberg’s new book \u201cNotes of Deception\u201d at her home in Carlsbad on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. (Hayne Palmour IV \/ For The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
The plan to visit the refuseniks was hatched in Boston, where Goldberg grew up, while she was performing with the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Like the other musicians, she was aware of the antisemitism and worse that Jews faced in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
But the group had learned of the Phantom Orchestra, a group in Tbilisi, the capital of what is now Georgia, composed of musicians, poets and activists who had been barred from leaving the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
With the support from the group Action for Soviet Jewry, which helped Jewish people emigrate, it was decided that four members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band would go into the country to connect with the Phantom Orchestra and other refuseniks and bring back their stories to share with the wider world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was all in,\u201d Goldberg said.<\/p>\n
The four musicians each brought something different to the table: Goldberg played the saxophone, Netsky the keyboard. Gerut sang, and Warschauer played guitar.<\/p>\n
As they traveled through the Soviet Union, meeting with the Phantom Orchestra in Tbilisi and other refuseniks in Armenia, the group connected with the people through music.<\/p>\n
They played traditional klezmer music,\u00a0along with Beatles songs and an especially emotional \u201cSomewhere Over the Rainbow\u201d by Judy Garland, given the song\u2019s sentiment of freedom.<\/p>\n
Despite the harrowing elements of the trip, it\u2019s those moments \u2014 of freedom and connection through music \u2014 that stand out to Goldberg as she looks back.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a way to feel human and dignified,\u201d Goldberg said of the music. \u201cAnd under the circumstances of so many of these folks being beaten, harassed, interrogated, imprisoned \u2014 just because they\u2019re fighting for human rights \u2014 the music made a humongous difference.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 1985 in the Soviet Union, Merryl Goldberg was interrogated by the KGB three times, briefly kidnapped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[647,967,181,23,74,76,75,420,1696],"class_list":["post-440435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}