Page 147 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

was a 1927 plan to rename a street after the Yiddish-language playwright I. L. Peretz. Suggesting that

Poles were having Jewish cultural influences imposed upon their national space, the report lamented

that the “poor Polish councilors” were left “looking through the encyclopedias to find out who Peretz

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is and how he served the field of writing.” The following year, the newspaper also reported on a
council meeting in which it deemed all matters to have come from the viewpoint of Łuck’s Jews. The

atmosphere and physical conditions of the meeting even seemed to be a microcosm of the

disorganized state of the town—the councilors sat in a cramped room, everyone smoked cigarettes,

and the discussion was conducted without the necessary order and decorum, with the chairman

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unable to maintain control over the auditorium. By 1929, Józewski had dissolved several town

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councils so that people could elect representatives who had the “good of the whole town” at heart.
The formal trappings of democracy, he suggested, were actually impinging upon developments that,

once fully realized, would benefit all urban inhabitants, Polish and Jewish alike. As had been the case

ten years earlier, incoming actors came up with their own answers to the question of what democracy

should mean in the borderlands.

While the Sanacja’s local supporters rejected the National Democratic idea that Jewish

backwardness was innate, they did suggest that the regrettable local situation could be corrected only

through enlightened and self-consciously Polish policies. When the author of another article

described how the town’s Jewish “clique” had been defeated during Równe’s municipal elections in

1932, he saw it as a specific blow against those Jews who had spent many centuries “inhaling the air

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of the ghetto” and were united only in their fanatical hatred of “goys.” After all, the “enlightened”
part of Jewish society had voted for cooperation with other nationalities, raising hopes that the new

35 “Z Rady Miejskiej,” Przegląd Wołyński, March 25, 1928, 6.
36 Ibid., 5.
37 “Sprawozdanie Wojewody Wołyńskiego o ogólnym stanie Województwa, działalności administracji państwowej
w r 1929-ym i ważniejszych zamierzeniach na przyszlość,” AAN MSW (Part 1) 69/154.
38 “Po wyborach w Równem,” Przegląd Wołyński, June 19, 1932, 1.

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