Vladimir Rott is an engineer and, lately, an author, and if he were to add anything else to his career list a good fit might be high stakes poker player. Mr. Rott, see, has got guts. Nerve. And it is a good thing that he does because if he didn’t we wouldn’t be sitting at a cluttered table in his north Toronto home talking about KGB generals and RCMP spooks and friendly Air Canada flight attendants and the price of freedom which, when translated into Russian rubles in 1974, cost Mr. Rott precisely five boxes of chocolate plus a rather substantially sized white lie uttered to one very serious looking Russian character.

Mr. Rott was serious in his own right: a Russian-born Jew of Hungarian descent and child of a so-called enemy of the state who disappeared into a Siberian gulag when his son was just three years old. Mr. Rott worked his way up the totalitarian ladder and was in charge of equipment at the massive Lada manufacturing plant in Togliatti.

In Iron Curtain terms, Mr. Rott had made it big. But in his heart he felt sick. Trapped. He and his wife, Iya, a university professor, were in agreement: life would never taste good until they lived it in the West.

Mr. Rott had family in Canada, distant cousins, people he had never met but who invited the Rotts to a wedding in Toronto in the summer of 1974. Here was a chance. He wrote letters to the Kremlin, made formal requests, petitioned influential people and was always greeted with the same answer when he inquired about leaving the country for a brief spell: Nyet.

Iya has always been my hero for this

His last best hope was to puff out his chest and arrange a meeting with a KGB general who knew him because the KGB knew everything about everybody in Togliatti. He explained that there was a wedding, and that the family in Canada was Protestant, and for a Protestant marriage to take place the bride and groom needed the blessing of every single known relative — no matter how far flung. No blessing, no wedding. Of course, Mr. Rott knew nothing of Protestantism, or of his own religion, Judaism. But what the heck, he thought, it was worth a shot. The clincher was when he told the general that Iya and their three children would remain in Togliatti.

“Iya has always been my hero for this,” Mr. Rott says, eyeing his wife of 52 years, who is helpfully offering her input to the family yarn while preparing tea in the kitchen.

The meeting with the KGB man would be the beginning of a happy ending that, of late, has incorporated an unusual twist. But first, Vladimir tells me, flapping his arms, we must talk of 1974 — because without 1974 there is no new twist, no next chapter.

Russia-

Papers were obtained and a final series of, ah, bribes made at the airport in Moscow. A box of chocolates presented to a ticket agent, another box to her manager and another box to the nice lady at the gate. And then there he was, along with his elderly mother, Regina, on a practically empty Air Canada flight bound for the West.

Mr. Rott wept. He thought: free at last. He was 39 years old. Two years later Iya and the three kids joined him in Canada.

According to the Rotts the RCMP were occasional visitors to their north Toronto home — while the occupants were not at home. “They thought I must be a KGB spy,” Mr. Rott says, in his thick Russian accent, laughing. “They didn’t understand that for my whole life my mother cried for her dead husband. He was taken from her.

“And Iya and me knew we needed to leave. I was the son of an enemy of the state. I came to Canada for the future of my children, but I also came for my father. There was no grave for him in Russia. We had nothing.”

Now there is a headstone in a Toronto cemetery.

Mr. Rott started his own engineering design firm and, a few years ago, told his life story in a two-volume memoir — In Defiance of Fate: Book One, Joy from Sadness and In Defiance of Fate: Book Two, Joy of Discoveries. Written in Russian and translated into Hungarian and English the books were read, it turns out, by a librarian in a wind-battered town on the shores of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia.

This is where the story resumes for the 78-year-old defector and his 75-year-old wife. The Siberian town, Babushkin, was once known as Mysovaya. It was a bustling stop along Tsarist Russia’s Great Tea Road. (In addition to the stereotypical vodka, Russians are, historically, voracious consumers of Chinese tea.)

Mysovaya (present day Bubushki) was a thriving trading hub on the shores of Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, and home to a wealthy Jewish merchant class that vanished when the Trans-Siberia railroad bypassed the town. All that is left is an old Jewish cemetery that Toronto residents Vladimir Rott and his wife Iya are working to restore.

Iya’s grandfather, a prosperous Jewish tinsmith named Shlomo Guterman, lived in Mysovaya, a detail Mr. Rott noted in his memoir.

The detail elicited the following email from halfway around the world: “It was a revelation to me to learn that in the late 19th century a large family named Guterman lived at Mysovaya,” Taisya Chernich, a.k.a. the librarian, wrote. “I never even heard that name in Mysovaya. I went to the local museum, but they have no information. I know that there is an old Jewish cemetery at Mysovaya which, unfortunately, has been practically destroyed.”

The Guterman clan was among 1,600 Jews who, at one time, prospered in Mysovaya. At its zenith in the early 1900s the merchant hive was home to 5,000 inhabitants. Today there are no Jews. Or rather no Jews that are practising Jews, since Communism effectively drove all religion underground. (Mr. Rott didn’t even know his own mother knew how to pray until they came to Canada.)

Market forces hastened Mysovaya’s decline. The Trans-Siberian railroad bypassed the town and the Jews moved to other places. Many presumably perished in the Holocaust. Many more, quite possibly, have descendants who have no clue that their great-great-grand-bubbe is buried in a forgotten Jewish cemetery in a forgotten merchant town near the shores of Lake Baikal.

“We went to Mysovaya to see it for ourselves in 2011 and we were shocked,” Mr. Rott says. “It was a very primitive place.”

Even more shocking: Ms. Chernich discovered a relative of Iya’s still living in the town in a psychiatric institution. The man, named Yura, died soon after the Rotts’ visit. But there were no Jews around to bury him according to Jewish tradition. Enter the librarian. With the help of Google searches and email tips from Mr. Rott, a group of Christians buried Yura as a Jew — in late December 2011.

“Nobody in the world hears of non-Jews burying a Jew — as they were Jews — when they don’t have a rabbi or a single Jew around,” Mr. Rott says. “But they buried Yura, a simple man, with such honour.”

“This gave us the idea that we should restore the old Jewish cemetery. Clear the forest and erect a monument with all the names of those buried there. Why should these poor people be forgotten?

“If we have one chance for them to be remembered, why wouldn’t we take it?”

It is a great question. The Rotts have answered it by passing the hat at their Toronto synagogue, banging on doors and telling Canadian Jews the story of a wind-battered town on the shores of Lake Baikal. They have also been sending cheques to Taisya Chernich.

The librarian is overseeing the restoration work in Mysovaya. The monument, already in place, will be officially finished and unveiled after the Siberian winter. (It was minus-2 there on Friday.) A handful of locals, long-lost Jews, have visited the site to inform Ms. Chernich they have dead relatives buried there.

Jewish history is reawakening in a place where the past had been lost, that is, until a Russian-Canadian defector, the son of a man who never had a proper burial in Russia, and who bet everything in 1974 to leave, mentioned it in a book.

“That was the beginning,” Mr. Rott says, smiling. “That was our start.”