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Moscow, I wanted to meet him, so I stood in line waiting to shake his hand after the performance. When I introduced myself, he grabbed me in a long bear-hug. “You gave us hope,” he told me. “We knew you were out there fighting for our rights, even thought we couldn’t contact you. You made us feel safer.”
I had no idea that Rostropovich or any of the other artists or dissidents whose rights we advocated, had ever heard of us, or had any idea of what we were doing on their behalf. Rostropovich’s hug, and what he said, was more than enough compensation for all the pro-bono work we had done on behalf of dissidents and artists around the world.
I had become involved in the defense of Soviet dissidents after reading Elie Wiesel’s eye-opening book “The Jews of Silence,” which first alerted me to the plight of Soviet Jewish and non-Jewish dissidents. I traveled to the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe on several occasions during the 1970s and 1980s and filed briefs on behalf of dissidents Refusenicks and others. I have written extensively about this aspect of my human rights work elsewhere” and will not repeat it here. Suffice it to say that my unwillingness to limit my advocacy only to Jewish Refusenicks in the Soviet block caused a rift with some Jewish and Israeli organizations, but I insisted that human rights must extend to all who are oppressed or discrimination against.
One of my Soviet clients was Silva Zalmunsen, who after several years of confinement was finally released from the Soviet Gulag. When she finally came to America, I along with her other American lawyers arranged to meet her over lunch at Lou Siegel’s, a kosher restaurant in Manhattan. It would be our first “reunion” — hopefully the first of many — with the clients we had never met. Our encounter was emotional and tearful. Knowing of Silva’s love for all things Jewish, we decided to order a real old-fashioned Jewish meal for our Friday lunch. The first dish was cholent, a delicious concoction of beans, potatoes, barley, and a small amount of beef, cooked for hours in a savory sauce. When the cholent came, I turned to Silva and explained what it was — that it was a traditional dish served in Jewish homes on the Sabbath. She took one taste of it, and her face turned sad — and then she burst out laughing as she exclaimed, “Traditional Jewish food? This is Russian prison food! I’ve just been through eating food like this for four years!” Only then did we realize that the old-fashioned food, which was such a treat for us, was peasant food, designed to use the least amount of meat possible. The same economics that dictated the diets of our peasant forebears now determined the menus prepared by the prison authorities. We all had a good laugh, and I ordered a slice of rare roast beef for our guest.
I made several trips to the Soviet Union during that time. On one of them I met a young man who had been a dissident and refusenick but who had been drafted into the army because of his activities. He wanted to smuggle a message out in is own voice, using his broken English, to seek support from human rights organizations throughout the world. Tape recorders were not permitted in the Soviet Union at that time and it was illegal to smuggle out tapes. But he had managed to get his hand on a primitive cassette recorder and he brought me a copy of a Tchaikovsky tape that was being sold in the Soviet Union. In order to prevent re-recording over the tape, certain changes had been made in the cassette. My Soviet client knew how to override those changes and he managed to record his statement in lieu of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. He told me that its always good to have the recorded statement in the
°8 [cite Best Defense, Chutzpah, articles]
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