Somewhere Over the Rainbow
I am now back in
Israel, waiting for my granddaughter to give us her impressions of her life as
a “lone soldier”. Actually, she is serving in the airforce so we are still “up
in the air”. Which reminds me of something I heard some time ago which is probably
not well-known.
Perhaps the most
emotional song to emerge out of the mass exodus from Europe was “Somewhere Over
the Rainbow” which was introduced in the popular film The Wizard of Oz.
The
song was voted the 20th century’s No. 1 song by the Recording
Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. The lyrics were
written by Yip Harburg, the youngest of four children born, in New York to
Russian-Jewish immigrants. The music was written by Harold Arlen son of Jewish
immigrants from Lithuania.
In writing it, the
two men reached deep into their immigrant Jewish consciousness, from the
progroms of the past and the Holocaust about to happen. Read the lyrics in
their Jewish context and suddenly they are no longer about wizards and Oz but
about Jewish survival:
“Somewhere over the
rainbow / Way up high / There’s a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow / Skies are blue / And the dreams that you dare to
dream / Really do come true. Someday I’ll wish upon a star / And wake up where
the clouds are far behind me. Where troubles melt like lemon drops / Away above
the chimney tops / That/s where you/ll find me. Somewhere over the rainbow /
Bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow / Why then, oh why can’t I? If happy
little bluebirds fly / Beyond the rainbow / Why, oh why can’t I?”
The Jews of Europe
could not fly. They could not escape beyond the rainbows. Harburg was almost
prophetic when he talked about wanting
to fly like a bluebird away from the “chimney tops”. In the post-Auschwitz era,
chimney tops have taken on a whole different meaning than the one they had at
the beginning of 1939. The Nazis had not yet created the crematoriums and gas
chambers that they used during the Holocaust.
It is ironic that
for 2,000 years, the land that the Jews heard of “once in a lullaby” was not
America, but Israel. The remarkable thing would be that less than 10 years
after “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was published, the exile was over, and the
State of Israel was reborn. Perhaps the “dreams that you dare to dream really
do come true”.
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