Tarnopolsky delivers a haunting tale of human rights in the Soviet Union. The story focuses on the author's imprisonment and battle with the Soviet government to grant him emigration from the USSR. The first-person narrative focuses with chilling detail on describing the author's experience in the Soviet Labor Camps. However, Tarnopolsky constantly shifts from the first-person-narrative to philosophical drivel on the nature of man that sometimes seems like he's using up space.

Nancy Rosenfeld, a Chicago suburban housewife who became involved in the rescue of Soviet Jews after her trip to the USSR in 1982, describes a personal journey. In the Ukraine she met a refusenik scientist and poet, Yuri Tarnopolsky, who was later arrested and sent to a Siberian labor camp. A human bond grows and develops between them, though they live in two distant and different worlds, and they become obsessed in their struggle over his freedom. Rosenfeld becomes involved with international affairs, finds access to prominent figures, and does everything possible and impossible to free Tarnopolsky from imprisonment. So much so, that after Yuri Tarnopolsky's ultimate release and emigration she suffers a nervous breakdown due to the void the triumph had left.

The author documents the work of the Chicago branch of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, a national grassroots organiztion that was determined to prevent a new tragedy by following the lessons of the Holocaust. Rosenfeld describes typical methods of conducting a campaign against the violation of individual human rights. This is the first time the Soviet Jewry Movement in America has been documented.

Publishers Weekly called Unfinished Journey, "A significant contribution to our understanding of how grassroots American Jewish Activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry helped 'open the iron door' of the USSR."

Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard University, one of two international attorneys who participated on this case also authored the book's Foreword.