Page 135 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

CHAPTER FOUR:
POLISH TOWNS? JEWISH TOWNS?

Interwar Volhynia was a rural province in a predominantly rural country, a land of fertile plains,

gently undulating hills, and marshlands where the majority of people made ends meet by working the

land or raising cattle. Indeed, for many outside observers who perceived that they were living in a

world of fast-paced change, it was precisely the province’s seemingly premodern rural qualities that

made Volhynia so intriguing. When the American explorer Louise Boyd took a journey across

Poland in 1934, driving along dirt roads and penetrating the “primitive” marshlands of the eastern

borderlands, she saw local towns as places in which to get a night’s sleep or to observe more closely

1
the behavior of peasants who flocked to market to sell their wares. Eschewed by Boyd for this
reason, the towns that dotted Volhynia’s landscape—Ostróg, Korzec, Równe, Łuck, and Kowel, to

name but a few—have also been overlooked in the recent historiography of eastern Europe, with

2
scholars often focusing on more exciting large metropolises and capital cities. Volhynia’s towns
thus seem to have slipped through history’s cracks.

This chapter begins with the basic premise that we should neither overlook these small towns

nor view them only within the frameworks of backwardness or nostalgia. Indeed, it is precisely their

liminal position between “the urban” and “the rural” that makes them prime locations in which to

explore how Polish elites navigated the tensions of modernization, civilization, and nationalism on

the state’s periphery. How did our second-tier actors—in this case, urban planners, state officials, and

1 Louise Boyd, Polish Countrysides (New York, 1937), 88.
2 While a recently published volume on “metropolitan aspirations” in eastern Europe between 1890 and 1940 shows
how elites in the region “raced” toward European-style modernity, the chosen cities are generally well known to
most readers: Kiev, Saint Petersburg, Zagreb, Belgrade, Wilno, and Warsaw. These particular cities may seem
peripheral, insofar as traditional historiography has deemed eastern Europe to be peripheral to the mainstream
European story, but they were by no means peripheral within the region itself, representing instead its largest and
most modern urban centers. See Jan C. Berhrends and Martin Kohlrausch, eds., Races to Modernity: Metropolitan
Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890-1940 (Budapest, 2014). Recent works on Polish modernity have also focused
on the intellectual, social, and cultural contexts of large cities. For instance, see Nathaniel D. Wood, Becoming
Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (Dekalb, IL, 2010); Katherine Lebow, Unfinished
Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Ithaca, NY, 2013).

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