During the Second World War sentimentality reclaimed the mainstream of American popular music. Ballad recordings—slow, romantic love songs—increasingly pushed aside the hot jazz sounds of the era’s dance bands. The singers of these songs were an assortment of old and new faces—Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, Vaughn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra. Their hit songs, recordings such as “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Together,” “My Devotion,” and “There Are Such Things,” exchanged cynicism and irony for optimistic...

© 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press “An enormous cap of dark grey smoke above the Extinct City in the Capital maintains, with the weight of its material, the reality of the fiction that is the emptiness: the City in the City, the City that no longer is.” —Stanisław Śreniowski, a Jewish historian living in hiding on the “Aryan” side, recalling the Ghetto Uprising [1] In the courtyard behind the apartment building at 55 Sienna Street, one can still visit a rare fragment of the wall that, for a...