As a measure of individual and collective identity, music offers both striking metaphors and tangible data for understanding societies in transition. This book traces the tumultuous and momentous shifts in the music cultures of Central and Eastern Europe from the first harbingers of change in the 1970s through the revolutionary period of 1989-90.

Here presented for the first time in English are Beregovski's surviving essays, plus his anthologies containing hundreds of folk songs with full Yiddish and English texts.