Jerzy Kosinski
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Jerzy Kosiński (June 18, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was a novelist of Jewish origin, born in Łódź, Poland. As a child during World War II, he survived under a false identity in a Catholic Polish family in eastern Poland. A Catholic priest had issued him a forged baptismal certificate, a practice common in the Polish Catholic Church during the war. After World War II, Kosiński was reunited with his parents and earned degrees in history and political science in Poland before emigrating in 1957 to the United States. In 1962 he married American steel heiress Mary Hayward Weir, who in 1968 died of cancer.
Kosiński is perhaps best known for his novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971). Being There was made into a 1979 movie directed by Hal Ashby, starring Peter Sellers. The screenplay was written by Kosinski and won the 1980 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Best Screenplay Award, as well as the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium. Steps (1968), a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes, won the National Book Award in 1969. He was supposed to be at actress Sharon Tate's house on August 9, 1969, but was left stranded in New York after missing a connecting flight. That night, Mrs.Sharon Tate was killed, along with Kosiński's friends Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski, and two others by followers of Charles Manson.
Although many readers assumed The Painted Bird was based on the author's experiences during World War II, the events depicted are now widely considered to be fictional. Describing the experiences of a boy (of unknown religious and ethnic background) wandering about a surreal Polish countryside and hiding among cruel peasants, the novel is presumably a metaphor for the human condition: alienation in a dehumanized, hostile and thoroughly evil world. Some readers have accused Kosiński of anti-Polonism; others argue that this is a misinterpretation of the metaphoric nature of the novel. In newer editions of The Painted Bird, Kosiński explained that the characters' nationality had intentionally been left ambiguous in order to prevent that very sort of interpretation.
Some people believe Kosiński was a professional confabulator. In 1982, the Village Voice accused Kosiński of plagiarism, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. (Being There bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy — The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma — a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz). The Voice also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. His defenders assert that this argument neglects the stylistic differences apparent in the work of almost any artist over a period of more than a few years. Kosiński himself responded by writing The Hermit of 69th Street (1988), an attempt to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book.
In the same Village Voice article, the public was shown a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust — a picture which was later confirmed by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and an American biographer, James Sloan. The Painted Bird, ostensibly semi-autobiographical, was demonstrated to be a work of fiction: rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never been appreciably mistreated. In response, Kosiński argued that he had never maintained that the book was based on true events.
Kosiński committed suicide on May 3, 1991. His parting note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity." (Newsweek, May 13 1991.)
Bibliography
- The Painted Bird (1965)
- Steps (1969)
- Being There (1970)
- The Devil Tree (1973, revised and expanded 1982)
- Cockpit (1975)
- Blind Date (1977)
- Passion Play (1979)
- Pinball (1982)
- The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)
Further reading
- James P. Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography, Diane Pub. Co., 1996, ISBN 0788153250.
- Joanna Siedlecka, Czarny ptasior (The Black Bird), CIS, 1994, ISBN 8385458042.
- Welch D. Everman, Jerzy Kosinski: the Literature of Violation, Borgo Press, 1991, ISBN 0893702765.
External Links
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