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It would seem that Mr. London, a leader of klezmer groups in New York, and his librettist, the playwright Elise Thoron, have some explaining to do.

Mr. London and Ms. Thoron are both white.

The opera, by Frank London, Elise Thoron and Music-Theatre Group, combines Afro-Cuban and klezmer music to tell the story of an indigenous Taino leader who fought against Spanish colonization, and a 20th-century Jewish refugee and poet who was inspired by him.

In 1984, before the Berlin Wall came crashing down, a young Slavic-languages scholar from Manhattan named Elise Thoron went to Leningrad and fell in with the theater students.

We caught up with Thoron hours before she flew out of New York to visit her partner’s family in Rome.