The painted birdbyJerzy Kosinski

The Painted Bird (1965) is a controversial novel by Jerzy Kosinski. It was first book he published under name "Jerzy Kosinski" after publishing two non-fictional book under pseudonym Joseph Novak. The book established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. The book describe the world as seen by a young boy during WWII while wandering around unidentified areas of Eastern Europe during World War II and taking refuge among a series of people, many of whom are brutally cruel and abusive, either to him or to others. The book was received with tremendous acclaim while causing major political stir in Poland when first published. Later, the book caused completely separate stir as Village Voice article accused Kosiński of plagiarism in 1982.

The book describes the world as seen by a young boy during WWII while wandering around unidentified areas of Eastern Europe. The boy encounters many peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality and rape, and in a huge amount of violence exciting a form of lust. The book title was drawn from an incident within its content. The boy, while in the company of a professional bird catcher, observes how the man took one of his captured birds and painted it several colors. Then he released the bird to fly in search of a flock of its kin, but when it came upon them, they saw it as an intruder and tore at the bird until it fell from the sky.

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Authorship controversy
According to Eliot Weinberger, contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator, Kosiński was not the author of the book. Weinberger alleged in his collection Karmic Traces that Kosiński had very little fluent knowledge of English at the time of its writing.

M.A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger's assertion by saying: "Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right."

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Claims of plagiarism
In June 1982, a Village Voice article accused Kosiński of plagiarism, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. (Being There, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy - The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma, a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz). The article also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. The New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey, who in Kosiński's American biographer James Sloan's opinion was embittered by his own lack of literary success, claimed to have written The Painted Bird. Reavey's assertions were ignored by the press.

The Village Voice article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust – a view which was later supported by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and Sloan. The article revealed that The Painted Bird, assumed by reviewers to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. The article maintained that 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.

Terence Blacker, an English publisher of Kosiński's books and an author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in response to the article's accusations in 2002:

    "The significant point about Jerzy Kosinski was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect."

D. G. Myers responded to Blacker's assertions in his review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan:

    "This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. 'There was a hollow space at the center of Kosiński that had resulted from denying his past,' Sloan writes, 'and his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star.' On this theory, Kosiński emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against… all-out psychosis.

The journalist John Corry, being himself a controversial author, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in the New York Times in November 1982, defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the "Arts and Leisure" section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that "Kosiński was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign."

The book was published and marketed as a fictional work although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II. Only later did it became clear to most reviewers that Kosiński was neither the boy in the story nor did he share any of the boy's experiences, as revealed in a series of articles in newspapers and books. The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional. D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, reviewing a biography of Kosiński noted that initially the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences." According to James Park Sloan, by the time the book was going into publication, Kosiński refrained from making further claims of the book being autobiographical – in a letter to de Santillana and in a subsequent author's note to the book itself. Kosinski nonetheless continued to assert that characterizing the novel as autobiographical "may be convenient for classification, but is not easily justified" (the same language he used in his author's note and his pre-publication correspondence with de Santillana) in later interviews during his life.


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Controversy in Poland
Soon after the book was published in the US, Kosiński was accused by the then-Communist Polish government of being "anti-Polish," especially following the regime's 1968 anti-Semitic campaign. The book was banned in Poland from its initial publication until the fall of the Communist government in 1989.

When the book was finally published, the Polish couple who rescued Kosiński (then Josef Lewinkopf) during the war, became highly indignant about how they were depicted even though in German occupied Poland any kind of help to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punishable by death often for the whole family. They recognized the names of Jewish children sheltered by them (who also survived the war), presented in the novel as victims of abuse by characters based on them. They informed the press about the fact that Kosiński "had lived through the years of Nazi occupation not only in safety, but in comfort" under their protection. Jerzy was baptized and received Holy Communion; he served as an altar boy. His parents even employed a maid. Summing up the ensuing reception of the book in Poland, Phillip Routh wrote: "The Poles branded Jerzy Kosiński a Holocaust profiteer because the novel, which drew comparison with The Diary of Anne Frank, was immediately granted the status of a chronicle of the Holocaust," while – at the same time – exciting a form of lust reminiscent of the extreme part of modern day Holocaust pornography.

Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw professor Paweł Dudziak remarked that "in spite of unclear role of its author [The Painted Bird] is an achievement in English literature." He stressed that since the book is a work of fiction and does not document real-world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment may result only from taking it too literally.

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Product Description
Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski's story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing excess where senseless violence and untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski's novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today's society than it was upon its original publication.