“Vilna, Vilna”

This recording of “Vilna, Vilna” is performed by Adrienne Cooper, Zalmen Mlotek, and the New Yiddish Chorale. Arrangement by Mark Zuckerman, from the album In Love and Struggle: The Musical Legacy of the Labor Bund. This Yiddish song, a paean to Vilna, was written in the 1930s in the United States by A.L Wolfson with music by Alexander Olshanetzky. It soon traveled across the ocean and became an unofficial anthem of the Jewish community in Vilna. It was performed at almost every musical program in the Vilna Ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Today it is performed at most events commemorating the Holocaust in Lithuania. The refrain goes: “Vilna, Vilna, our hometown/Our longing and our desire…/Ah, how often your name calls forth/ A tear from my eye/Vilna streets, Vilna rivers/Vilna forests, mountains, and valleys/Something aches, something yearns/For the days of long ago.”