Page 160 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

The unresolved question of urban expansion really took off in October 1933 when the head

of Łuck county wrote to the Volhynian provincial authorities with a dual message about the necessity

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of extending the town’s borders. On the one hand, his arguments were based on economic
modernization and rationalization—by extending the town’s administrative reach to those areas on

the eastern side of the river, for instance, the town could make more effective use of water

transportation. But he also stressed the need for a more fundamental change by arguing that allowing

more Christians (whether Ukrainians, Poles, or Germans) to vote in the upcoming town council

elections would transform Rożyszcze from what he called a “Jewish ghetto [sic]” into a “mixed

settlement” whose population was more inclined to invest in the town’s development. Moreover, he

explained that the town councilors’ opposition to expansion was a consequence not only of their wish

to preserve Jewish influence on the council and prevent a drop in the value of land in the town center

but also of a more fundamental Jewish resistance to modernization. Petty Jewish tradesmen, he went

on, are “firmly backward” and “take a dim view of any reforms whatsoever,” particularly those that

might lead to “the initiation and development of non-Jewish trade.” Despite resistance from both the

town council and the inhabitants of the areas for planned incorporation, the proponents of annexation

won the day and the Ministry of the Interior issued a decree to extend the town’s borders.

A close reading of these debates provides one way of reconceptualizing the history of

“ethnic relations” in interwar Poland. Indeed, the willingness of Polish elites to utilize triangular

demographic configurations at a local level during the early-to-mid-1930s points to the limits of

viewing ethnic or national groups as isolated binaries, like Poles and Jews or Poles and Ukrainians.

As we have seen, civilizational hierarchies that made sense in one moment could be adjusted to suit

the exigencies of another. Moreover, these documents also reveal the ways in which local people

who pushed back against state plans blended prevailing ideas about what urban spaces were

71 Letter from the head of Łuck county to the Volhynian provincial office (October 6, 1933), AAN MSW (Part 1)
298.

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