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more confrontational approach, arguing that the Jewish population’s backwardness threatened the

essential and rightful Polishness of kresy towns. Just as the Russian authorities had themselves

targeted urban Jews as unreliable local elements, so supporters of the Endecja depicted these same

populations as the bearers of damaging and stubbornly persistent Russian influences, which were

both anti-Polish and anti-modern.

Modernity was by no means an unambiguously positive characteristic in the eyes of right-

wing Polish nationalists. Instead, they differentiated between what was pre-modern (a positive,

Polish characteristic) and what was anti-modern (which they associated with Jews). Writing in the

right-wing daily Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) in 1923, for instance, Marceli Prószyński, a

member of the Polish parliament for the National Democrat’s Popular National Union party (Związek

Ludowo-Narodowy), imagined the “pain and disgust” that a Pole would feel on walking through the

24
streets of Krzemieniec. In the article, Prószyński lamented that Krzemieniec, a historic Volhynian

settlement with a special place in the annals of Polish history thanks to its famous lyceum, had

become a Jewish town in which the Russian language had virtually replaced Polish, the latter being

rarely heard on the streets. Rather than seeing Jewish assimilation into Russian culture as a symptom

of modernity, however, he argued that it simply proved that Jews responded only to force

administered by a hard hand like that of the empire. If Prószyński looked backward in time toward an

imagined pre-modern Polish past, Jews constituted a decidedly anti-modern force. Not only could a

“Jewish swarm” be found on the town’s narrow streets, Prószyński argued, but specifically Jewish

attempts at modernization were half-hearted and poorly executed: even efforts to generate electricity

left the town very poorly lit in the evenings.

This act of juxtaposing Jewish backwardness (which they believed was cloaked in a surface

adherence to defective modernity) against Polish historical traditions and attachment to the right kind

24 Reprinted in “Kresy—Wołyń,” Myśl Narodowa, March 22, 1924, 12.

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