Page 141 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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toilets created a host of unpleasant sights and smells. Moreover, the health director went on, the
“uncultured population” did not maintain basic hygiene in the private toilets that existed in the

courtyards and even avoided using them altogether, “making use of free spaces around the toilet, next

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to the fences, the walls, etc.”
As they sought to blame someone for this unenviable state of affairs, Polish elites looked

toward the Russian imperial authorities. But while Russian personnel, who had dominated the

imperial administrative life of larger towns in the shape of state, police, and military functionaries, as

well as teachers, continued to play a significant role in some urban-based professions, Poles would be

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hard-pressed to call these settlements Russian towns by the early 1920s. Who, then, could be

blamed for their ongoing backwardness now the imperial rulers had been overthrown? For those on

the National Democratic right, the backwardness of the towns was the fault of their largest single

population—Jews. As we saw in Chapter 2, in the eyes of the Endeks, it was this group that

embodied all that was defective and foreign about life in the eastern borderlands during the early

1920s, especially in the towns.

There were few mysteries as to why Volhynia’s urban settlements, particularly the

miasteczka—or shtetlekh, as they were known in Yiddish—had predominantly Jewish populations.

Polish landlords had attracted Jewish artisans to their private towns prior to the partitions, while

Russian imperial authorities had subsequently restricted Jewish populations to urban settlements

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within the western borderlands. In many ways, Jews were the towns; it was their predominance and

economic activity that made a settlement a town, rather than a village, in the first place. The

settlement of Dąbrowica, for instance, was officially divided between a town and a village with

16 Only a handful of towns had public toilets. Kowel, Turzysk, and Mielnica each had one, while Włodzimierz had
two. Szaniawski, “Sprawozdanie roczne ze stanu zdrowia publicznego,” 13. Ostróg was the only town with a sewer
system before 1914. Mędrzecki, “Przemiany cywilizacyjne,” 108.
17 Szaniawski, “Sprawozdanie roczne ze stanu zdrowia publicznego,” 13.
18 Mędrzecki, “Przemiany cywilizacyjne,” 107; Mędrzecki, Województwo Wołyńskie, 185
19 Pinchuk, “The Shtetl,” 497-8; Weeks, Nation and State, 59-64; Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl.

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