vilne alef-beys (2023) 10'

program note

There is a well-known Jewish story about a community that has come together on a holiday to pray. The Rabbi becomes aware that someone in the congregation is praying so fervently and with such devotion, that his prayers are going straight up to heaven. The Rabbi looks around, among all the devout and educated and scholarly people who are praying together, and sees a young, poor, uneducated boy, and he realizes that it is this boy whose prayers are so powerful. The Rabbi asks the boy what he is doing, and the boy answers that, since he never learned to pray, the best he can do is recite the alphabet, with all his sincerity, in the hope that God will rearrange the letters into the proper prayers.

The Yiddish alphabet forms the background text that runs underneath my entire piece. Yiddish uses a hybrid, modified Hebrew alphabet. There are many words and sounds in Yiddish that have Germanic influences, and they require pronunciations that Hebrew letters can’t really make, so the Yiddish alphabet combines the Hebrew letters in ways that ‘trick’ the consonants into making the more Germanic sounds. ‘Alphabet’ is alef-beys in Yiddish.
There was a time, not that long ago, when many people in Vilnius would have been able to read these letters, and speak this language. Not only the Jews, who used to live there, but many non-Jews who interacted with them. My own relatives began leaving Lithuania in the early part of the 20th century – my grandfather from Gargždai (Gorzd in Yiddish) and my grandmother from Šilalė (Shalel in Yiddish) among them.

Many American Jews have roots in Lithuania, and it was not uncommon for the recent Lithuanian immigrants to be nostalgic about the world they left behind. In the 1930’s a Lithuanian immigrant in New York wrote a poem about his own nostalgia for Vilnius (Vilne in Yiddish). His name was A. L. Wolfson, and another recent immigrant – Alexander Ol- shanetsky – set it to music. Their song, with its text in Yiddish, was called ‘Vilne, Vilne.’ It quickly made its way back to the Jews in Vilnius, where it became a popular song, and then a kind of anthem when the Nazis moved the Jews into the Vilna Ghetto, in 1941.

My piece vilne alef-beys takes a few lines about Vilnius from this poem, and sings them over the background of a congregation chanting the alef-beys.

vilne alef-beys is dedicated to my cousin Linda Spitz, on the occasion of her 70th birthday. Linda is the unofficial archivist for our familiy’s history in Lithuania.