Small Towns in Inter-War Poland

Summary

POLISH JEWISH provincial towns in the first half of the twentieth century deserve our attention for several reasons. Many factors contributed to the disappearance of these small towns, with their unique ethnic, cultural, and occupational structure. Antoni Słonimski commemorated their disappearance in a touching elegy:

No more will you find those little towns, where the cobbler was a poet,

The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.

No more will you find those towns where biblical psalms

Were linked by the wind with Polish laments and Slavonic ardour,

Where old Jews in the orchard, under the shade of cherry trees,

Wept for the sacred walls of Jerusalem.

Small towns were common in the Polish territories. As Ryszard Kołodziejczyk remarks, ‘Their numbers, their continuity—virtually up to the present—as well as their economic and civilizational significance are, in a way, derived from a centuries-long process of development, with its belated urbanization, the dominance of the village over the town, negligible industrialization, and all that we find in the countries of central and eastern Europe.’

Considering the diverse character of these small towns, it is not easy to specify which settlements, from an economic and social point of view, should be included in this category. In inter-war Poland there was a considerable discrepancy between the number of chartered towns and the number of settlements that could be counted as towns on the basis of their social and economic characteristics. There seems to be more than a grain of truth in Pierre George's remark that it is impossible to define the term ‘town’ in simple and universal terms; and yet the straightforward measures of size and appearance remain the best criteria.

In previous studies several factors have been used as criteria for categorizing a settlement as a town—among them the settlement's economic function, its production and processing of raw materials, and the number of its inhabitants (under 10,000 people). In 1937 Wanda Rewieńska included in the category of small towns all settlements that enjoyed civic rights; all settlements that had been classified as towns in the past; all settlements with railway stations; and all settlements with more than 2,500 inhabitants.