Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosiński (June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was an author of Jewish origin, born in Łódź, Poland. As a child during the war, he survived under a forged identity in the family of Catholic Poles in eastern Poland. A Catholic priest had issued a forged baptism statement, as was a common practice in the Polish Catholic Church during World War II. He was reunited with his parents after the war and earned degrees in history and political science in Poland before coming to the United States in 1957. In 1962, he married American steel heiress Mary Hayward Weir. Weir eventually died of cancer in 1968.

Kosiński is perhaps best known for his novels The Painted Bird and Being There. (Being There was later made into a movie directed by Hal Ashby and starring Peter Sellers.)

Though it had been implied that The Painted Bird was based on the author's experiences during World War II, it is now widely considered that the events depicted are fictional. Describing the fate of a Gypsy boy travelling around a surreal landscape of the Polish countryside and hiding among extremely cruel and inhumane peasants during World War II, the novel is a metaphor of human fate: alienation in a dehumanised, hostile, and purely evil world. Some readers accuse Kosinski of anti-polonism , while others argue that such interpretations stem from a lack of understanding of the metaphoric nature of the novel. In newer editions of The Painted Bird, Kosinski explains that the characters' nationality was intentionally ambiguous so as to prevent this sort of interpretation.

Many people believe Kosinski was simply a professional confabulator. In 1982, the Village Voice accused Kosinski of plagiarism, with much of his work derivative from Polish sources with which English speakers were unfamiliar (For example, Being There bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy, the Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz ). The Voice also made the accusation that Kosinski's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors." Critics making these charges often point to the wild differences in prose style between Kosinski's novels, while the author's defenders say that this argument neglects the stylistic differences apparent in the work of almost any artist over a period of more than a few years. Kosinski himself responded by writing The Hermit of 69th Street (1988), an attempt to show the absurdity of noting all prior art by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book.

In the same Village Voice article the public was also confronted with another picture of the life of Kosinski during the Holocaust, which was later confirmed by a Polish biographer Joanna Siedlecka and an American biographer James Sloan . It was revealed that The Painted Bird, which had been published under the assumption that it was semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction: rather than wandering the countryside of Poland, it was revealed that Kosinski had spent the war years hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never personally been significantly mistreated. Kosinski defended himself by arguing that he had never maintained that the book was based on true events. Since then it has been widely considered that The Painted Bird is a parable rather than a realistic account of personal experiences.

Kosinski committed suicide on May 3, 1991. Tabloid publications widely reported that his death was the result of autoerotic asphyxiation, but this was dismissed in the coroner's report, which observed that his parting note read "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity." (quote from Newsweek, May 13, 1991).

Further reading

• James P. Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Diane Pub Co, 1996, ISBN 0788153250
• Joanna Siedlecka, Czarny ptasior, CIS, 1994, ISBN 8385458042
• Welch D. Everman, Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation, Borgo Press, 1991, ISBN 0893702765