Passport to Yesterday — Yuri Druzhnikov

A moving and ambitious novel, this story concerns an exiled Soviet musician who finds himself back in his homeland and drawn to his hometown -- and the secret of his father's disappearance during World War II. Gifted young violinist Oleg Nemets' rural life is overturned in the storm of the Second World War and the repressive regime that succeeds it. Blown far away from his home and a father who never returned from the front, Oleg lands in San Francisco as a violinist in the symphony orchestra. But years later, when the orchestra tours the Soviet Union, a series of events and clues from his past lead him back to his old town, the story of his father's disappearance and the Russia he left behind.