Russian Lullaby

Irving Berlin

This is a great song, the Redbone version a rendition that I have never heard before. Russian Lullaby was written by the great Irving Berlin. Berlin was born Israel Isadore Beilin in Tyumen, Russia in 1888. Tyumen was the first Russian settlement in Siberia.

This song has been performed by a wide variety of performers over the years including Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane and Jerry Garcia. An immigrant's song of plaintiff remembrance.

When my mother's dad left Moldava in 1922 he was forced to sign a document promising that he would never return to the land of his birth. As desolate and hard as our existence might once have been, it is a difficult thing to imagine the pain of forsaking one's homeland forever.