My mother, may she rest in peace, could not listen to much criticism of this country from her youngest child. Her childhood in gloomy anti-Semitic southern Poland had devolved into adolescence in a frigid Siberian forced labor refugee camp. She lost much of her family in Auschwitz and buried her own disease-ridden father in an unmarked field somewhere in what we now know as Kazakhstan. America was indeed the bright lights, the beacon, the shining city on the hill, the epitome of dreams, of longing, of freedom, and it was all relief and hope when she arrived here in the winter of 1946.

Her favorite song, the one I would hear her singing in a lilting soprano or humming over laundry folds from time to time, was Somewhere Over the Rainbow. She chose well, along with millions over the past eighty years who consider it one of the best songs ever written, named in 2001 the Number One Song of the 20th Century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Harold Arlen wrote the music, Yip Harburg nee Isidore Hochberg the lyrics, and it garnered a 1940 Oscar for Best Original Song for The Wizard of Oz. Many similarly feel that the musical adaptation of writer L. Frank Baum’s and illustrator W. W. Denslow’s 1900 novel is the best movie ever made.

It was the 25th of August in 1939 when Judy Garland’s Dorothy Gale, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow first arrived in theatres to critical acclaim but tepid box office. (Only after debuting on the small screen in 1956 would Oz become the perennial smash watched over and over that we know it as today.) That last week of August more than eighty years ago, my 11-year-old mother was nervously getting ready for the start of 4th grade in small-town Poland, oblivious to the perils of 11-year-old Dorothy uprooted and carried away by a tornado from small-town Kansas.

Just a few minutes into the film, Dorothy and her beloved small terrier Toto encounter the nightmarish Miss Gulch who shows up at the family farm with a sheriff’s order to have Toto taken away and destroyed for nipping at her leg. Dorothy’s aged aunt and uncle reluctantly allow the beloved dog to be taken from Dorothy’s arms and placed into Gulch’s bicycle basket. After Dorothy runs out of the living room in tears, Aunt Em exclaims “Almira Gulch, just because you own half the county doesn’t mean you have the power to run the rest of us. For 23 years I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you. And now, well, being a Christian woman, I can’t say it.” Shortly Dorothy is reunited with Toto who has escaped his brief imprisonment by leaping from the bicycle basket. Dorothy tells Toto that they’ve got to run away, that there must be a better place where there isn’t any trouble, then wistfully launches into the ballad at the farmstead while Toto looks on adoringly.

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby—

     The dreaded storm arrives and sweeps Dorothy and Toto, Kansas house and all, off to a faraway land of flawed characters and scary encounters. There they come to believe that the way back home to the suddenly precious love of family and friends is at the end of a yellow brick road in a miraculous place run by a miraculous wizard.

     History tells us that 16-year-old Judy Garland on camera in gingham dress singing this song of hope was itself a miracle. For one thing, the former Frances Ethel Gumm was constantly undermined for not being thin or attractive enough in the eyes of the lecherous Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer in charge of Oz studio MGM. And the song was deemed by Mayer to do nothing but slow the film down, rescued from the cutting room floor only by the manic producers Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed who threatened to walk without it.

     My mother knew nothing of Dorothy and Toto, but she could tell that her parents and the rest of the Jewish grownups in her village were troubled by the coming storm. Kristallnacht, war rumblings, news of Hitler’s power and his demands for return by Poland of land taken from Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, worries about Poland’s defense capabilities. She knew nothing of the August 23, 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And she knew nothing of the Nazi-staged raid on a German radio tower in Gleiwitz on August 31, 1939 which would be used as propaganda and pretext.

     The next day, September 1, 1939, a week to the day after Dorothy arrived in theatres, Hitler’s planes and tanks arrived in the blitzkrieg of Poland. Two weeks later the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland to complete the negotiated territorial division. A month of chaos and death and surrender. My mother’s tiny village lay on the western side of the River San, the Nazi Germany side, that ran along the new line of partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Although many members of her extended family would die at Auschwitz, my mother and her parents and two brothers escaped the Nazi killers into the arms, and heavily-guarded barbed wire fence encampments, of Russians in Siberia. A strange, frigid and dark place, a place with its own all too real Witches and Winkies, without food, without school or friends, without purpose, without childhood, without freedom or hope.

     There would be no going home again after the war, no ruby slipper return for my mother, who instead was able to make it to the real Oz, the one everyone would want to find and no one would want to leave. That wonderful place down the yellow brick road, over the rainbow and across the Atlantic. No looking back. There the teenager learned English, came of age, married a bona fide American war hero, raised two children, moved from city apartment to suburban house, made up for her interrupted education of 1939 with a GED in 1987, held down a retail store job she loved. She watched baseball games and game shows and the years rolled by. The evening news on the three networks showed the war dead, the riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, too many leaders assassinated in mad cold blood and too many other leaders falling on their own lies, the bombings, the ever-increasing cynicism.

     You don’t know what it’s like over there, she would say, tears always at the ready from some combination of nightmare memories that would never completely end and her son’s seeming lack of understanding.

     I would try to explain that I wasn’t bailing, that I loved our country but lamented the men and women dying for reasons more illusory by the day, that somehow I just wanted to help things improve here. She would laugh, annoyed, and walk away mildly red-faced, unwilling to engage. She had escaped the worst, the bottom. I get it, the appreciation, the loyalty, the love, and ultimately the denial because I would have been no different.

     Maybe it was cognitive dissonance that wouldn’t allow her to see that there are only deep bottoms because someone everywhere, even here, keeps creating extreme tops. The Munchkins weren’t doing well in hiding before the adolescent traveler in pigtails dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East and the Winkies and the rest of the citizenry wasn’t doing very well before she melted the Wicked Witch of the West. Most of all, Dorothy wasn’t going to complete her journey before outing the Wizard from behind the curtain Toto drew back.

     Which strangely brings me to Lou Reed’s Dirty Boulevard, written right here in Oz by the deceased rock icon, a Jewish man born in 1942 Brooklyn and raised in 1950s Long Island just ten miles east of my childhood home along a busy thoroughfare with the promising name of Sunrise Highway. First with John Cale and the Velvet Underground and beginning in 1972 as a solo artist, Reed wrote and performed songs of real people and places, strugglers, misfits, victims, have-nots, all from his own memorable journey. You simply could not get through a day during my high school senior year without the unfolding introductory bass lines and Holly from Miami F.L.A. and the other Warhol Factory characters of Take A Walk on the Wild Side. But it was the harsh Dirty Boulevard which brings it all home, literally, even if home is too often not the haven it should be in our nation:

Outside it’s a bright night, there’s an opera at Lincoln Center, movie stars arrive by limousine,
the klieg lights shoot up over the skyline of Manhattan, but the lights are out on the mean streets,
a small kid stands by the Lincoln Tunnel, he’s selling plastic roses for a buck, the traffic’s backed up
to 39th Street, the TV whores are calling the cops out for a suck,

And back at the Wilshire, Pedro sits there dreaming, he’s found a book on magic in a garbage can,
he looks at the pictures and stares at the cracked ceiling, “At the count of 3” he says, “I hope I can disappear”,
and fly, fly away, from this dirty boulevard…..

Gratitude is great, but it doesn’t mean we have to look away from the yellow brick roads turned dirty boulevards everywhere, dark and hopeless prisons without walls, right here in America. Most people don’t escape them and they don’t get to fly, fly away. We will never eliminate them by looking away or looking down. We need to tell their stories because their residents have the same dreams we all do. Our top goal should be to make those dreams realistic, right here, under the rainbow.

Peter Brav is the author of the novels Zappy I'm Not, The Other Side of Losing , Sneaking In, and 331 Innings. His shorter work has appeared in Black Fork Review, Kelsey Review, Monarch Review, Echo Magazine, US1 Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, and many other publications. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School and now lives on a farm in Central New Jersey.