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health workers—construct ideas of what a modern European town should look, sound, and even

smell like, and how did they think Volhynia’s towns measured up? Which elements of a town’s

history did they wish to highlight and which remnants of imperialism did they want to get rid of?

And since Volhynia’s post-imperial towns had an overwhelming Jewish majority, what role (if any)

did they think local Jews—nominally equal citizens of the Polish Second Republic—should play in

urban development?

Approaching these questions by tracing the construction of physical and administrative

spaces forces us to move away from traditional methods of telling the history of borderland towns

and cities in which these places appear as little more than stages upon which battles between clear-

3
cut national groups were enacted. Instead, the very concept of the town needs to be returned to its
proper historical context, viewed less as our unproblematic unit of analysis and more as an idea

created by our protagonists at a specific time and in a specific place. We therefore begin with both an

exploration of what towns came to mean in Volhynia after the First World War—legally, politically,

and aesthetically—and an overview of the anti-Semitic depictions of these urban spaces that were put

forward by National Democratic writers during the early-to-mid-1920s. Just as importantly, however,

the chapter also moves our historical narrative forward in time to the period after what scholars of

Poland have tended to see as a major break in interwar political history— Józef Piłsudski’s 1926

coup d’état in Warsaw. It therefore provides us with an opportunity to trace what remained constant,

as well as what changed, across 1926.

In particular, a close reading of sources created by the people who set about transforming the

towns of Volhynia (according to their own technocratic ideas about what an urban space should be)

highlights tensions between the language of national inclusion and the impulse to label certain

3 On Lwów, see Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician
Capital, 1772-1914 (West Lafayette, 2009); Christoph Mick, Lemberg - Lwów - L'viv, 1914 - 1947: Violence and
Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette, 2015); Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. On Wilno, see Weeks,
Vilnius between Nations.

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