INTRODUCTION

IF 20 per cent of all Jews-the second largest Jewish community in the world at that time-lived in Poland during the interwar years, then the history and heritage of a plurality of Jews in the world today stem from that territory and time. Yet, as Jerzy Tomaszewski recently pointed out,the history of Jews in Poland in the twentieth century has received much less attention than the earlier period. For obvious reasons, most studies concerned with the present century focus on the Second World War and less on the events preceding it. The interwar years cover a very short time-span, but it was an extremely important and crucial period. Poland was being pieced together and re-created as one nation, and, although the effects of the rule of the three governments which had partitioned Poland did persist to some extent, the history of the country's Jewish population was now being shaped by a sovereign Polish state.

Writings about the interwar years deal primarily with history and statistics in a way which presents a monochromatic picture derived from facts, documents, and censuses. This image needs to be filled in by means of firsthand anthropological and cultural research. In her foreword to Life is with People Margaret Mead noted how such work captures ‘the essence of a culture just as it was changing forever into something new and strange'. During her travels in Israel, Agata Tuszyńska noticed that: ‘In coincidentally met company in Haifa, Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem will always be found someone from Lublin, Bialystok, or Warsaw: the grandson of the rabbi from Przysucha or a relative of the innkeeper from Lubartów; a son of a friend from Nowotki Street or the daughter of the tailor from the Bilgoraj market square.’ In order to understand the ‘new and strange’ modern Jewish culture, the context of its predecessor needs to be borne in mind.

Another tendency in existing literature is to centre on Jews in large municipalities. This focus probably stems from a mistaken impression that most Jews, stereotypically considered urban, lived in sizeable cities. The rising importance of socialist and nationalist movements in the 1920s and 1930s must be acknowledged, assimilation was indeed increasing, and by 1931 a quarter of Poland's Jews lived in the five major urban centres of Warsaw, Łódź, Vilna, Kraków, and Lwów.