Page 152 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Jewish former inhabitant of the town of Luboml recollected, while there was no precise border

between Jewish and Christian life, there just seemed to be a “certain spot…where Jewish life stopped

and the life of Luboml’s gentile citizens began.” If Jews resided in the town center, the houses of

49
Christians “surrounded the Jewish part of town like a belt.” But this differentiation between
“Jewish” (central) and “non-Jewish” (peripheral) space did not map neatly onto the Polish categories

of miejski (urban) and wiejski (rural). Indeed, the transitional quality of this space meant that drawing

definitive boundaries between the town and the countryside was often a tricky business and one that

inevitably created a series of debates in which representatives of state power and local inhabitants

each defined what “urban” space meant to them. The concept of the “semi-urban” (podmiejski or

przedmiejski) areas around the towns thus provided a way of thinking about the potential uses of an

in-between space that could not be clearly categorized according to the urban-rural dichotomy.

In many ways, the case of the provincial capital is instructive. Łuck had a special place in the

hearts of Volhynia’s Polish elites, not least because this is where many of them lived and where the

province’s two major weekly newspapers were published. Advocates of Łuck argued that, unlike

other towns in the province such as Równe and Kowel (which they deemed to be the “artificial

creations” of imperial rule), Łuck was a genuinely Polish center and a place where Russian influence

50
had never put down strong roots. Buildings that marked political continuities with both the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth and versions of the Polish state that predated the Commonwealth could

be found within the cluster of narrow and unregulated streets situated by the bend in the river Styr:

old churches, the Great Synagogue, and the impressive Lubart’s Castle (Figure 4.1). And yet pride in

Łuck’s Polish history was twinned with embarrassment about its current civilizational status. As one

49 Menachem Erlich, “Fond Memories of My Shtetl,” in Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl, edited by
Nathan Sobel (Hoboken, NJ, 1997), 137.
50 “Czy Łuck będzie przy magistrali kolejowej?,” Przegląd Wołyński, July 16, 1924, 2.

152