Unfinished Journey: Two People, Two Worlds...from Tyranny to Freedom'

Despite its sometimes clumsy, sometimes hyperbolic prose, this book tells a most important story: how Rosenfeld, an upper-middle-class, suburban Chicago housewife turned fervent activist, spearheaded a five-year, grassroots campaign (1982-86) to gain freedom for the Ukrainian-Jewish scientist and poet Yuri Tarnopolsky. Tarnopolsky had been imprisoned on trumped-up charges and denied permission to emigrate for years. Rosenfeld and other volunteers at the Chicago Action for Soviet Jewry applied the political equivalent of a ``full court press''--using letter-writing campaigns and lobbying in coordination with similar efforts throughout the U.S. and in France--generating so much international attention that the cost of retaining Tarnopolsky finally came to exceed that of allowing him to leave. Rosenfeld also writes movingly of the price her husband and two sons paid for her ``compulsory activism,'' and of her disorientation and depression when this activism waned after Tarnopolsky was freed. Rosenfeld makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how grassroots American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry helped ``open the iron door'' of the U.S.S.R. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)