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A Polish-American Polemic

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  Francis Casimir Kajencki (1918-2008) A puzzling circumstance of the Second World War is that it reached the status of a global conflict when the British and French empires, ostensibly out of concern for Polish sovereignty, declared war on Germany in the wake of its September 1939 invasion of Poland, but that these same powers not only did not declare war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland that month, but joined forces with Stalin’s government in an alliance to defeat the Axis. Allied “victory” in Europe, moreover, resulted not in the restoration of Polish independence, but Soviet occupation of Poland along with the rest of Eastern Europe. A little-known book, American Betrayal: Franklin Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity , grapples with this problematic legacy of the war. Self-published by Francis Casimir Kajencki in 2007, the year before he died, the book is a patriotic Polish-American’s pained assessment of his country’s treacherous treatment of its b...
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Connie Francis and the Flag

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  Blessed with one of the most gorgeous voices of the twentieth century, Connie Francis was emblematic of the optimism and ostensible health of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era and personified the immigrant family success story. Funny and personable, saucy without being salacious, the sultriness of her delivery never diminished the essential innocence of her America’s sweetheart persona, and hits like “Who’s Sorry Now?”, “Stupid Cupid”, and “Where the Boys Are” made her the best-selling female vocalist in the history of the recording industry during the period of her greatest popularity [1]. Connie abandoned her real name, Concetta Franconero, at the suggestion of Arthur Godfrey, whose Talent Scouts show boosted her profile when she was still an adolescent [2], but the singer’s Italian-Americanness was hardly a secret. Her musical roots reach back to the toe of Italy’s boot and Reggio di Calabria, from which her paternal grandfather emigrated in 1905, bringing “an old broken down conc...
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Remembering America's First Holocaust Museum

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  Neither the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles nor the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the capital – both opened in 1993 – was America’s first institution dedicated to the Shoah. That distinction belongs to Yaakov (Jacob) Riz, a Philadelphia Jew originally from Poland, who maintained a “miniature Jewish Identity Center and Yad Vashem, the only one in America” [1], in the basement of his home at 1453 Levick Street during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. “He is about five feet tall and can’t weigh much more than 100 pounds,” a 1971 Philadelphia Inquirer profile related, also noting, “He talks incessantly lapsing at times into Russian and translating into English, singing Yiddish songs, quoting jokes and Jewish stories from memory and citing newspaper and magazine articles.” [2] More somber than jovial in the bulk of his public activism, however, Riz purports to have been “sentenced to death in Soviet Russia as an anti-Communist and Zionist” but i...
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Subterranean California Lead Pipe Pipe-Dreamin' Blues: "Loser" and Beck's History of the Twentieth Century

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  Participation in the New York anti-folk music scene of the late eighties and early nineties “made Beck realize there are no restrictions when it comes to subject matter for songs.” [1] Back in his native Los Angeles and playing the bar and coffeehouse circuit in 1991, the unknown musician further developed the idiosyncratic sense of humor with which he would become associated. “I’d be banging away on a Son House tune and the whole audience would be talking, so maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience’s boredom, I’d make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening,” he recalled, adding that “‘Loser’ was an extension of that.” [2] The legend of the song’s genesis as an amateurish burst of “impromptu rapping” goes like this: […] Tom [Rothrock] and Beck went over to producer Karl Stephenson’s house to play around. Beck laid down some slide guitar, Stephenson looped it, and then Beck freestyled over a Public Enemy-esque beat. When he found himself at a...
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