Page 144 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

of modernity was a typical technique employed by those on the anti-Semitic right as they framed

debates about the role of kresy towns more broadly. In reference to the region, the National Democrat

Jędrzej Giertych argued that carefully planned and constructed kresy towns needed to boast the

characteristics of modern urban life: water-supply systems, sewers, pavements, lighting, buses and

25
trams, and flower beds. While Giertych revered national traditions and socially conservative

institutions like the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, he was simultaneously committed to a

26
vision of Polish urban modernity in which Jews had little place. In highlighting Jewish
“backwardness” in the east, these men echoed the revulsion expressed in western European countries,

such as France and Germany, toward the “uncivilized” Ostjuden, rather than another commonly held

27
anti-Semitic trope—that Jews represented hypermodernity in its most damaging form. As Polish
elites spoke about the importance of modernizing and integrating the state’s backward periphery,

therefore, the towns of Volhynia occupied an ambiguous position. On the one hand, they represented

potential centers of Polish modernity that could act as civilizing islands, radiating out to a rural

hinterland; on the other, they constituted nefarious oases of imperial and Jewish backwardness,

which threatened to undermine the state’s civilizing mission from within. The question was this:

which role would they end up playing?

JÓZEWSKI’S TOWNS

In May 1926, appalled by the gridlock in party politics, Józef Piłsudski came out of his self-imposed

political exile and carried out a coup in Warsaw. In doing so, he ushered in the period of the so-called

Sanacja, which sought to “cleanse” Polish politics of corruption and infighting, curtail the ills of

25 Jędrzej Giertych, O program polityki kresowej (Warsaw, 1932), 98.
26 Ibid., 121.
27 On France, see Richard Parks, “The Jewish Quarters of Interwar Paris and Tunis: Destruction, Creation, and
French Urban Design,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 1 (Fall 2010), particularly 69-74; on Germany, see Steven E.
Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness
(Madison, WI, 1982).

144