Page 230 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

“From afar the town looks beautiful, on a hill surrounded by the marshes of the [river] Ikwa, on

which the castle walls and the towers of the churches dominate,” Orłowicz wrote in his description of

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Dubno, “Inside, however, the town is inhabited by Jews, showing itself to be less attractive.” When
describing Korzec, a town on the Polish-Soviet border, Orłowicz similarly suggested that Jews had

damaged urban aesthetics during the nineteenth century, when the once beautiful market square had

been “completely deformed” by the construction of “ugly and unstylish Jewish houses, which

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removed the character of the market square and transformed it into a dirty lane.”

[INSERT FIGURE 6.4]

Figure 6.4a and b: Two photographs of historically significant synagogues (Ostróg is on the left;
Luboml is on the right). Source: Orłowicz, Ilustrowany Przewodnik po Wołyniu.

If Jews remained the objects of simultaneous praise and criticism for their roles in both

constructing and spoiling urban landscapes, attempts to frame this population by utilizing the same

ethnographic motifs that were more readily applied to Slavic peasants were also riddled with

tensions. On the one hand, by building on the Jewish ethnography that had been carried out by the

playwright and folklorist S. Ansky in the imperial governorate of Volhynia on the eve of the First

World War, regionalists argued that Volhynia’s Jews could similarly become the subject of a Polish-

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Jewish intellectual project and offered them up as an authentic vestige of pre-partition Volhynia.
Significantly, however, this ethnographic approach was not applied to all Jews in equal measure,

70 Ibid., 283.
71 Ibid., 246-7.
72 For the links between Russian populism and Jewish ethnography, see Eugene M. Avrutin and Harriet Murav,
“Introduction,” Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Lebanon,
NH, 2009), edited by Avrutin, 3-25. Ansky’s team took more than 2,000 photographs of Jewish people and sites,
collected ritual and everyday objects, transcribed folktales, legends, proverbs, songs, and melodies, recorded folk
music on wax cylinders, and utilized questionnaires on the patterns of life, traditions, superstitions, and customs. See
Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Cambridge, MA,
2011), 11.

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