Borscht, Beethoven and Brahms

For an extraordinary evening, invite a few concert musicians from the former Soviet Union to dinner.

The City Opera violinist took charge of the cooking. She brought all of the ingredients and made everything fresh on the spot. Borscht with beets, carrots, three colors of bell pepper, potatoes, parsnips. Kasha. Rice pudding with coconut milk, with cinnamon sugar carefully wrapped in a brown paper envelope. Dainty sour cherry dumpings with transparent skins, folded before my eyes, doused in a delicious cherry sauce, with full-flavored Latvian sour cream from Brighton Beach.

We lit candles and said a traditional Hebrew blessing over challah bread. Then we ate until 1:30 a.m. Great comfort food was interspersed with great stories of hardship, survival and heroism. "We fled to Siberia...I paid 900 rubles to get my violin out of the country. It took me three years once I got to Israel to pay it back.... They wanted to drill a hole in my violin before I could take it, but my father went into hysterics.... We had to leave our Bluthner piano in Russia; they would only let us take three violins, our underwear and the clothes on our backs... He played in Paris and they paid him almost nothing, just like everybody else..."

Stories of World War II are remembered. How a brave Japanese diplomat wrote 2,000 visas for Latvian Jews to go to Japan and kept issuing them aboard the train that took him away after his firing...how the Jews arriving in Japan were sent to Manchuria to work in factories...how they went to Israel after the war, and how one violinist's father was shot there, after coming so far, by an Arab sniper.

Stories of growing up: "We kept the carrots and pickled cabbage in big barrels between the double entry doors to keep cold, and grew garlic and opinions on the window sill. Then we had potatoes and onions. Those were the only vegetables all winter." "My grandfather used to say, 'If you stack the dumplings horizontally instead of vertically when you eat, you would be able to put your boots on." "My mother would kill me if she saw me putting the dumplings in a bowl, you're supposed to lay them out separately on a flat plate."

Each of my guests surmounted unbelievable obstacles to settle and make their livings in the United States. Not satisfied merely with having survived, they have a dream. They wish to start a music school similar to the excellent ones they attended in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where children were taught where music fit in history, along with superior technique and musicianship. But this school would have a difference: it would enjoy the open society's freedom.

"I didn't hear Handel's Messiah until I arrived in Canada," said the St. Petersburg-trained violinist. "It wasn't permitted in the Soviet Union. I'll never forget the first time I heard it."

The City Opera violinist had been more fortunate. "My school had a full library, because we were in the provinces far away from watchful eyes."

Having been deprived of so much, they love literature passionately. They all know Rabelais. The Latvian pianist goes into rhapsodies over my copies of the Divine Comedy and The Odyssey. They are at home in a world of New York's scholarly Russian expatriate intellectuals -- an obvious talent pool for the dream school's teachers.

These women are seeing their livelihoods and culture disappearing fast. They teach and play for ludicrously small remuneration, often under the dictats of directors without classical music background. Even back home in Russia, the government is on the verge of ending funding for the schools that turned them into world-class musicians, as oligarchs who care nothing for classical music control the country's massive oil wealth.

The City Opera violinist learned yesterday that the opera would be no fall season. Perhaps, she joked, she will open a restaurant. "We could play there," said the other violinist, a consummate chamber musician who has played all over the world. "If there is nowhere else."