Borderland Modernity: Poles, Jews, and Urban Spaces in Interwar Eastern Poland

This article argues that we should neither overlook small towns nor view them only within the frameworks of backwardness or nostalgia. Indeed, it is precisely on the eastern periphery of the Polish state, in those "backward" areas where modernization was seen to be most desperately lacking, that we can trace how Polish elites created narratives about their active role within a broader European civilizing project. Here the focus is on urban spaces in Volhynia, an administrative province in eastern Poland and home to populations that spoke various languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Czech, and Russian. Tracing debates around these towns offers a lens through which to explore the entangled histories of modernization and nationalism.