Alien City: The Vilnius Jewish Ghetto in Polish Texts of the Interwar Period

Abstract

This article analyses the cultural images of the Vilnius ghetto and the methods of its categorisation in Polish-language texts of the interwar period in tourist guides, feuilletons, and poetry. In the texts of the Vilnius authors, Julisz Kłos, professor of Vilnius University, poets Witold Hulewicz and Konstanty Gałczyński, the ghetto is defined in terms of modernity as a medieval and chaotic urban space that requires modernisation; in terms of pictorialism as a picturesque part of the city; in terms of heterogeneity as an alien space creating an urban heterotopia, and as a space of everyday life, specific for the whole of Vilnius. The article emphasises the fact that the image of Vilnius as an urban heterotopia was shaped by foreigners, including authors of German guides of the World War I years and subsequently by foreign guests visiting Vilnius in the interwar period. In their texts, the ghetto appears as an intriguing part of the city space. Noticed by a foreigner who played the role of the “other”, the specificity and originality of the ghetto influenced the perceptions of the city by some representatives of the Polish intelligentsia. The textual image of the Vilnius ghetto reveals the beliefs, worldviews, images, ideology, and to some extent the aesthetic inclinations of the authors for whom the ghetto was an alien city. A different attitude was represented by Jerzy Wyszomirski, a writer and journalist who comprehended the space of the ghetto, its languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, and treated the Jewish world with kindness as neighbourly and familiar, thus eliminating the structures of otherness that allowed the ghetto to be incorporated into the general idea of the city.