Страница:
to western Ukraine.
Park Avenue Synagogue
50 East 87 Street
New York, N.Y. 10125
Mr. Jeffrey Fager, Producer
CBS "60 Minutes"
524 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Dear Sir:
I feel that your program on Lviv and Ukrainians was most unfair.
To show boy scouts and say they are Nazis marching, to translate "Zhyd" as kike (in western Ukraine Zhyd is the
word for Jew), to infer that the word for nation - "natsiya" - might mean Nazi etc., etc. - is most upsetting to many
of us who know today's Ukraine.
It really is time for us to enjoy the resurgence of Jewish life in Ukraine after the horrors of the German
occupation and communism, and to appreciate the heroic efforts of the Ukrainian people and government to assist the
Jewish community in all their endeavors.
The history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations often tragic is a complicated one, but you would have done well to have
informed the public of the better aspects of those contacts. For instance, Ukraine was the sole independent nation
that had complete Jewish national autonomy (1917) and had Yiddish-speaking ministers in the government representing
the rights of minorities.
Today, when Russian Jews send their children to Ukraine for safe keeping in times of danger, no good can come
from distortions such as those portrayed in your program.
Yours faithfully,
Rabbi David H. Lincoln
HOME DISINFORMATION POLAND 8359 hits since 04-Feb-1998
Jerzy Kosinski: Grand Calumniator of Poland
Jerzy Kosinski
who the world understood to have been To Hell and Back
The Audie Murphy of the Holocaust
turned out to be little better than the
Grand Calumniator of Poland
Holocaust Witness Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski was once to Poland what Simon Wiesenthal is today to Ukraine. Jerzy Kosinski was the grand calumniator of Poland;
Simon Wiesenthal is the grand calumniator of Ukraine. The Poles have been successful in discrediting their grand calumniator; the Ukrainians
are too timid to attempt to discredit Simon Wiesenthal. The present web page is dedicated to understanding Jerzy Kosinski, to
congratulating the Poles, and to giving courage to Ukrainians.
Who was Jerzy Kosinski? Jerzy Kosinski was born Jerzy Lewinkopf to Mojzesz (Moses) Lewinkopf and Elzbieta Lewinkopf (maiden name
Elzbieta Wanda Weinreich). Six significant dates in Jerzy Kosinski's life were:
1933 born in Lodz, Poland
1959 entered USA on a student visa
1960 published The Future is Ours, Comrade, under pseudonym Joseph Novak
1968 won the National Book Award for The Painted Bird
1982 veracity challenged in Village Voice article, "Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words"
1991 committed suicide
Biographer James Park Sloan
I quote from two sources by the same author. I quote below from two sources, both written by James Park Sloan: (1) the magazine
article, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994; and (2) the book, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996. The
first source provides the first two excerpts below, in blue, which by themselves present the chief features of the Kosinski story. The reader
interested only in a broad outline need not read beyond these first two quotations. The second source provides a number of further
excerpts shown in green, which serve to flesh in a fuller picture. The analogy to Audie Murphy in the above title was taken from p. 227 of
this second source. Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WW II who went on to become a movie star, and played
himself in the autobiographical war film, To Hell and Back.
Who is James Park Sloan? The dust jacket of the Sloan book informs us of the following:
JAMES PARK SLOAN is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a prize-winning
novelist, and a widely published short story writer and critic. He knew Jerzy Kosinski for over twenty years
before Kosinski's death.
A Personal Experience
I recollect, by the way, many years ago talking to a New York Jewish lawyer about Kosinski's book The Painted Bird, partly on the basis of
which this lawyer held the deep conviction that Poles were pretty close to sub-human. When he told me about Kosinski's description of
eyeballs being torn out as an incident that would not be clearly out of place in a Polish household, I replied - to his discomfort - that such
a scene would be about as typical in a Polish household as it would be in an American one. When I added that the only Poles that I had ever
known were intelligent, civilized, and cultured he did not reply, but his manner suggested that I had told him something that was a patent
impossibility.
What's the Relevance?
Why is so much attention given to Jerzy Kosinski below, even to the point of touching on his sexual deviance and other character defects?
As already mentioned above, Kosinski provides a precedent of a calumniator of a Slavic peoples who has been successfully and thoroughly
discredited, and whose example thus may give Ukrainians courage to similarly discredit their many calumniators, chief among whom is Simon
Wiesenthal. Beyond that, however, the Kosinski biography provides unusually detailed information which brings to the fore several
generalizations which may assist in the understanding of the phenomenon of anti-Ukrainian calumny.
The Gang of Ten
Let us begin. Heading the list of anti-Ukrainian calumniators are the following nine: Yitzhak Arad, Dov Ben-Meir, Yaakov Bleich, Alan
Dershowitz, Sol Littman, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal. If we expand this list to include prominent calumniators
of Slavs, Jerzy Kosinski makes it a list of ten. In order to express my disapproval of these individuals, and in order to encourage in Slavs in
general, and in Ukrainians in particular, an attitude of bold intolerance toward their misdeeds, I propose that they be called "the gang of ten,"
as I myself do below.
Incidentally, the link to Sol Littman above will take the reader to the very section in "The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes" that deals with Littman,
but only when using a Netscape browser - readers relying on other browsers will have to use CTRL+F to get down to the section titled "Sol
Littman's Mengele Scare."
Examining the gang of ten, it is possible to arrive at several generalizations, the chief of which may be the following:
(1) The gang of ten is Jewish. One notices immediately that all ten of these calumniators of the Slavs are Jewish. This
observation reminds us that in examining those who were responsible for the 23Oct94 60 Minutes story, The Ugly Face of Freedom, seven
out of seven of those in the chain of command proved to be Jews (three being common to both lists).
But are there any non-Jewish calumniators? Of course there are, and where I find them, I impartially include them on the Ukrainian Archive.
Trouble is, I don't find many, and their calumniation does not rank as high. One of these is University of Toronto historian Robert Magocsi,
and another is Harvard University historian Omeljan Pritsak. Offhand, I can't think of any others. But while Magocsi and Pritsak distort, they
cannot compare with any of the gang of ten (or with any of the CBS gang of seven). The really egregious calumniation comes only from
Jews.
Henryk Sienkiewicz. Henryk Sienkiewicz (among my favorite novelists for his Quo Vadis) comes to mind as a Polish calumniator of Ukraine
(in his novel about Bohdan Khmelnytsky, With Fire and Sword), but he is not discussed on the Ukrainian Archive primarily because he is not
contemporary, and also because, like Magocsi and Pritsak, he is more subtle. The Ukrainian Archive restricts attention to contemporaries
whose calumniation is egregious.
The Ukrainian archive does not focus on Jews. It has been more than once remarked that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on Jews, which
is incorrect - which is no more than an additional calumniation of Ukrainians. The truth is that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on
calumniators, and it incidentally happens that the chief of these are Jews. If the leading calumniators of Ukraine had proven to be Czechs or
Poles or Romanians or Hungarians or Russians or Germans or Armenians or Iranians or Palestinians or Chinese or whatever, I would have
impartially and disinterestedly featured them instead of Jews. If someone can bring to my attention prominent contemporary non-Jewish
calumniators of Ukraine that I have been overlooking, I will gladly give them generous representation on the Ukrainian Archive, and if such
non-Jewish calumniators overwhelm the Jewish calumniators by their numbers, then all the better. The prominence of Jews on the Ukrainian
Archive is not to be explained by looking into my psyche, it is to be explained by examining the characteristics of calumniators of Ukraine. It
is not for me to justify why Jews appear so frequently on the pages of the Ukrainian Archive, it is for Jews to explain why no Gentiles can be
found whose anti-Slavic calumnies are able to compete with those of the Jews in the gang of ten (or with those of the Jews in the CBS gang
of seven).
(2) The gang of ten is prominent. One notices too that these are not ten obscure Jews, but highly placed ones. Their
names are recognizable. They constitute a Jewish leadership. They hold high office within the Jewish community, or within society
generally. Two have been spoken of as candidates for Nobel prizes. They frequently appear on television or are quoted in the media or are
cited in the discussion of Jewish affairs. Perhaps the only other Jews who equal or exceed them in prominence fall into three categories: (i)
Jews functioning in a non-Jewish capacity, as for example musicians and scientists; (ii) North American Jewish politicians, particularly
Congressmen, Senators, or Mayors in the United States, but again functioning only in small part as Jewish representatives; and (iii) Israeli
politicians and military leaders. However, restricting our attention to Jews who live in, or who are influential in, North America, and to those
who appear expressly as representatives of Jewish interests, the gang of ten constitutes a dominant clan. They set the agenda for
Jewish-Slavic dialogue. Even the one who lives in Austria (Simon Wiesenthal), and the two who live in Israel (Yitzhak Arad and Dov
Ben-Meir), are able to make their presence felt in North America either during their visits, or in being covered by the media, or by means of
their court room testimony either in Israel or in North America. American Jews such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are also highly
prominent, and do speak on Jewish affairs, but speak primarily of the State of Israel, and - unfortunately - have little to say about the
Slavic world. Overwhelmingly, the Jews who step forward to speak on the Slavs do so only to calumniate. Whereas individual Jews have
occasionally stepped forward to defend Ukrainians, I know of none who does so on an ongoing basis the way that the gang of ten defames
Ukrainians on an ongoing basis.
Raul Hilberg. Jewish historian Raul Hilberg deserves mention as falling in a class by himself. I do not agree with everything he says, but in
cases where I disagree, I do not regard Hilberg as guilty of calumny, but only as falling within the range of responsible but divergent opinion
which is to be expected upon any historical question. Raul Hilberg has amply demonstrated that he is ready to be guided by the evidence to
conclusions without regard to whether they are palatable to Jews or Germans or Ukrainians or other involved parties.
(3) The gang of ten is typified by deception. I understand calumniation to mean damaging utterances characterized
by untruth. An utterance that is true, I do not characterize as calumny no matter how damaging. To not mince words, then, the gang of
ten is a pack of liars. The most fantastic, the most childish, the most palpably untrue statements spew from their lips in profusion, as is
amply documented on the Ukrainian Archive. They suppress evidence, they create historical events out of thin air, they contradict
themselves from one recitation to the next.
(4) The gang of ten enjoys impunity for lying. When the deceptions of any of these calumniators are brought to
their attention, or to public attention, the refutations are ignored. The ten calumniators appear to be able to say whatever untruths they
want with little fear of punishment or censure or even embarrassment. They rarely have to correct their misstatements, or to retract them,
or to apologize for them. Of the ten, only Jerzy Kosinski has lost his impunity, but he did nevertheless enjoy a large measure of impunity over
many years of his professional calumniation. The generalization, therefore, is not that the gang of ten enjoy absolute and permanent
impunity, but only that they enjoy surprising measures of impunity over surprising intervals of time.
(5) The gang of ten is typified by modest intellectual capacity. On the whole, the members of the gang of
ten have the minds of children. This is demonstrated primarily in their lying which is primitive and palpable, and which is not merely
occasional, but which permeates their thinking. On top of that, their speech and their writing tends to be illogical to the point of
incoherence. They are strangers to the ideal of being constrained by logic. They don't know the facts, and they don't rely on facts. In not
a single case have I come across anything any of them might have said or written touching on Ukrainian-Jewish relations that one would be
forced to admire - or so much as respect - for its reasoning or its data or its expression. Given their prominence and their power, their
academic and intellectual accomplishments, on the whole, are unimpressive. The bulk of their writing would get C's or worse if submitted in
freshman courses in history or political science or journalism. The only one of the ten to achieve an unambiguous distinction outside his
calumniation activities is Alan Dershowitz - Harvard law professor, media star, defender of O. J. Simpson. He alone among the ten must be
acknowledged to have substantial academic qualifications and to show flashes of intelligence and wit. However, restricting myself to his
statements on Ukrainians or Palestinians, I find Dershowitz's thinking fully as primitive and as childishly self-serving and as duplicitous as that
of the other nine.
The incongruity between low desert and high reward is particularly great in the case of Jerzy Kosinski; the evidence below will demonstrate
that in addition to lacking academic capacity, and in addition to lacking literary skills, every area of his life was crippled by immaturity,
irresponsibility, deception, and perversion.
What picture emerges?
Is there any way of tying all of the above generalizations into a single coherent picture? Why should it be the case that the leading
slanderers of Ukrainians are all Jewish? How can it be that Jewish leaders are so prone to lying, and have such palpable intellectual
shortcomings, and sometimes even remarkable character defects? How does it come to pass that they are permitted to incite hatred against
Ukrainians with impunity? The answers to these questions can be found throughout the Ukrainian Archive.
An individual Pole is persecuted by Simon Wiesenthal
Jerzy Kosinski calumniated the Polish people collectively. Simon Wiesenthal persecuted a single Pole - Frank Walus - individually.
Time For the Quotes
And now for the quotations from Sloan's article:
Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" was celebrated for its "overpowering
authenticity":
"Jerzy was a fantastic liar," said Agnieszka Osiecka, Poland's leading pop lyricist and a familiar figure in Polish intellectual
circles.... If you told Jerzy you had a Romanian grandmother, he would come back that he had fifteen cousins all more Romanian
than your grandmother ... and they played in a Gypsy band!"
Osiecka was responding to a recent expose by the Polish journalist Joanna Siedlecka, in which she argued that Jerzy Kosinski,
Poland's best-known Holocaust survivor, had profoundly falsified his wartime experiences. According to Siedlecka, Kosinski
spent the war years in relatively gentle, if hardly idyllic, circumstances and was never significantly mistreated. She thus
contradicts the sanctioned version of his life under the German occupation, which has generally been assumed to be only thinly
disguised in his classic first novel, "The Painted Bird," published in this country by Houghton Mifflin in 1965. ...
In stark, uninflected prose, "The Painted Bird" describes the disasters that befall a six-year-old boy who is separated from his
parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of his
wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A farmer
forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the book, the boy
drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and is flung by the angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit,
he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. ...
"Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant account transcends confession," Elie Wiesel wrote in the Times Book
Review. At the time of Kosinski's suicide, in 1991, Wiesel said, "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography
I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."
Wiesel's review sanctified the work as a valid testament of the Holocaust, more horrible, more revealing - in a sense, truer
than the literature that came out of the camps. Other writers and critics agreed. Harry Overstreet wrote that "The Painted Bird"
would "stand by the side of Anne Frank's unforgettable 'Diary'" as "a powerfully poignant human document," while Peter Prescott,
also comparing it to Anne Frank's "Diary," called the book "a testament not only to the atrocities of the war, but to the failings of
human nature." The novelist James Leo Herlihy saluted it as "brilliant testimony to mankind's survival power."
"Account," "confession," "testament," "document," "testimony": these were the key words in the book's critical reception. What
made "The Painted Bird" such an important book was its overpowering authenticity. Perhaps it wasn't exactly a diary
six-year-olds don't keep diaries - but it was the next best thing. And in one respect it was better: Kosinski was Anne Frank as a
survivor, walking among us.
"The Painted Bird" was translated into almost every major language and many obscure ones. It was a best-seller in Germany
and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. It became the cornerstone or reading lists in university courses on the
Holocaust, where it was often treated as a historical document, and, as a result, it has been for a generation the source of what
many people "know" about Poland under the German occupation. At the height of Kosinski's reputation, there were those who
said that somewhere down the road Kosinski was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 46-47)
But turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth:
According to Joanna Siedlecka ..., Kosinski's wrenching accounts of his wartime experiences were fabricated from whole cloth.
... Siedlecka contends that Kosinski spent the war with his family his mother, father, and later, an adopted brother - and that
they lived in relative security and comfort.
The Kosinskis survived, she suggests, in part because Jerzy Kosinski's father, whose original name was Moses Lewinkopf, saw
bad times coming and acquired false papers in the common Gentile name of Kosinski; in part because they had money ... and
were able to pay for protection with cash and jewelry; and in part because a network of Polish Catholics, at great risk to
themselves, helped hide them.
Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have
collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the N.K.V.D., after the liberation of Dabrowa by
the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her
real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire
Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski
spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa - goods unavailable to the neighbors' children - in the safety of his
house and yard....
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, p. 48)
Right from the start, Kosinski wrote under duress - an impecunious young man,
particularly situated to be of use to clandestine forces, he could leapfrog to
advancement only by cooperating with these forces. Thus, his first book, the
Future is Ours, Comrade (1960), was published under the pseudonym Joseph
Novak, and appears to have been sponsored by the CIA:
Czartoryski recommends Kosinski to the CIA.
Between Kosinski's penchant for telling more than the truth and the CIA's adamant insistence on telling as little as possible, the
specific financial arrangements concerning the "book on Russia" may never be made public. Indeed, full documentation probably
does not exist. A number of facts, however, argue strongly that there was CIA/USIA intermediation on behalf of the book, with or
without Kosinski's full knowledge and understanding. One major piece of evidence is the name of the original titleholder on the
Doubleday contract: Anthony B. Czartoryski. A further clue was the address to which communications for "Czartoryski" were to be
delivered: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America at 145 East Fifty-third Street.
The clear presumption is that Czartoryski became aware of Kosinski's notes, suggested the possibility of a book to his contacts
within the CIA, and then had the manuscript delivered to Doubleday, which already was quite familiar with arrangements of this
nature; Gibney served unwittingly to protect the author's identity and the manuscript's origin.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 112)
Surprisingly quick production.
As for the book, not only its instant acceptance but its quick production would remain a mystery for many years. How could a
graduate student at Columbia - struggling with his course work, engaged in various side projects as a translator, and busy with
the details of life in a strange country - how could such a person have turned out a copy that could be serialized in the editorially
meticulous Reader's Digest in less than two years?
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 117)
Exactly what the CIA would have wanted.
All in all, the book is everything an American propaganda agency, or the propaganda arm of the CIA, might have hoped for in its
wildest dreams. In broad perspective, it outlines the miserable conditions under which Soviet citizens are compelled to live their
everyday lives. It shows how the spiritual greatness of the Russian people is undermined and persecuted by Communism. It
describes a material deprivation appalling by 1960s American standards and a lack of privacy and personal freedom calculated to
shock American audiences. The Russia of The Future is Ours is clearly a place where no American in his right mind would ever
want to live.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 129-130)
As Kosinski's veracity in The Painted Bird came increasingly under question, his
support came most noticeably from Jews, reinforcing the hypothesis of a Jewish
tendency to side with coreligionists rather than with truth, despite the consequent
lowering of Jewish credibility:
Byron Sherwin at Spertus also checked in with his support, reaffirming an invitation to Kosinski to appear as the Spertus award
recipient at their annual fund-raiser in October, before 1,500 guests at Chicago's Hyatt Regency. He mentioned a list of notable
predecessors including Arthur Goldberg, Elie Wiesel, Philip Klutznick, Yitzhak Rabin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel himself; the
1978 recipient, Isaac Bashevis Singer, had recently won the Nobel Prize. Kosinski was deeply moved by this support from
Sherwin and Spertus, and its direct fallout was a move to make Spertus the ultimate site for his personal papers, with Sherwin
serving as coexecutor of his estate. At the same time it accelerated his movement back toward his Jewish roots. In his greatest
moment of crisis, the strongest support had come not from his fellow intellectuals, but from those who identified with him as a
Jew.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 389)
Not only did the Jews get mileage out of The Painted Bird, but so did the
Germans, at the expense of the Poles, of course:
The German edition was a hit.
The book was doing reasonably well in England and France, better certainly than in America, but the German edition was an
out-and-out hit. For a Germany struggling to shuck off the collective national guilt for World War II and the Holocaust, its focus on
the "Eastern European" peasants may have suggested that sadistic behavior and genocide were not a national trait or the crime
of a specific group but part of a universally distributed human depravity; a gentler view is that the book became part of a
continuing German examination of the war years. Perhaps both views reflect aspects of the book's success in Germany, where
Der bemalte Vogel actually made it onto bestseller lists.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 234)
Attempt to dilute German guilt.
The Warsaw magazine Forum compared Kosinski to Goebbels and Senator McCarthy and emphasized a particular sore point for
Poles: the relatively sympathetic treatment of a German soldier. Kosinski, the review argued, put himself on the side of the
Hitlerites, who saw their crimes as the work of "pacifiers of a primitive pre-historic jungle." Glos Nauczycielski, the weekly
publication of the teaching profession, took the same line, accusing The Painted Bird of an attempt "to dilute the German guilt for
the crime of genocide by including the supposed guilt of all other Europeans and particularly those from Eastern Europe."
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 236)
Although Sloan does not speculate that the French may have had similar motives
to the Germans for promoting Kosinski's book, we have already seen the French
buying protection from accusations of complicity in the Holocaust, and wonder
whether the high honor they paid The Painted Bird may not have been motivated
to further deflect attention from their own collaboration:
Kosinski returned to New York on April 14, and only two weeks later received the best news of all from Europe. On May 2,
Flammarion cabled Houghton Mifflin that L'Oiseau bariole had been awarded the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger - the annual
award given in France for the best foreign book of the year. Previous winners included Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, Heinrich
Boll, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Lewis, Angus Wilson, and Nikos Kazantzakis. New York might be the center of publishing, but
Paris was still, to many minds, the intellectual center of the universe, and Kosinski had swept the French intellectual world off its
feet. Any who had doubted the aesthetic merits of The Painted Bird were now shamed into silence. The authority of the "eleven
distinguished jurors" was an absolute in New York as in Paris; Kosinski's first novel had swept the board.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 234-235)
The question has been raised on the Ukrainian Archive of what
conditions are likely to lead to the creation of a great liar. One such
condition might be a modest intellectual endowment which limits the
achievement that is possible by legitimate means. In Jerzy Kosinski's
case, Sloan drops many clues indicating that Kosinski's academic
career was a disaster, among these clues being political maneuvering
on Kosinski's part as a substitute for performance, which
maneuvering occasionally degenerated into "the dog ate my
homework" quality excuses, in this case being made on Kosinski's
behalf by patron Strzetelski:
Kosinski had used his time fruitfully, Strzetelski argued, in spite of his impaired health and "the accident (combustion of his right
hand) which made him unable to write during almost the whole 1959 Spring Session." It was the first and last mention in the file
of the injury to Kosinski's hand, which had not impaired his ability to produce lengthy correspondence.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 123)
Kosinski was unable to rise to academic standards. He disappointed
his friends. He was shunned by responsible scholars:
Unlike Kosinski, Krauze took the discipline of sociology very seriously; he was deeply committed to his studies, and it troubled
him that Kosinski was so blithely dismissive of its rigor and of the hurdles required in getting the Ph.D. By then Kosinski was busy
looking at alternative ways to get approval of his dissertation. One of them involved Feliks Gross: he proposed a transfer to
CCNY, where he would finish his doctorate under Gross's supervision. In Krauze's view, Kosinski had simply run into a buzzsaw
in Lazarsfeld, his Columbia supervisor, a man who could not be charmed into dropping the rigor of his requirements. Gross too
promptly grasped that Kosinski was trying to get around the question of methodological rigor; he politely demurred and excused
himself from being a part of it.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 169)
The pedestrian task of writing an examination, for Kosinski became a
trauma, and his capacity for academic work deteriorated to the level
of the pitiable:
[H]e had neglected the necessary preparation for his doctoral qualifying exam, the deadline for which now loomed.
On February 19 [1963] Kosinski sat for the examination as required. Midway through, he informed the proctor that he was unable
to continue. [...] [H]is flight from the doctoral exam marked a low point in his life in America - his academic career blocked, with
no alternative in sight.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 186)
But Kosinski was not only a student who could not study - he was
also, and more importantly, a writer who could not write:
Kosinski did well enough in spoken English, to be sure; his accent and his occasional Slavicisms were charming. But writing was
a different matter. He was, quite simply, no Conrad. In writing English, the omission of articles or the clustering of modifiers did
not strike readers as charming; instead, it made the writer appear ignorant, half-educated, even stupid. Conrad wrote like an
angel but could not make himself understood when he opened his mouth; with Kosinski, it was exactly the other way around.
Which might not have been such a handicap had not Kosinski been a writer by profession.
From the beginning of his life as a professional writer, Kosinski had to protect a terrible secret: He could not write competently in
the language in which he was published. Whenever he wrote a simple business letter, his reputation was at risk. Even a letter he
wrote to his British agent, Peter Janson-Smith, required a hasty followup; the solecisms and grammatical errors were explained
as the result of failure to proofread.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 174)
In view of Kosinski's inability to write, it is little wonder that he was
accused of using ghost writers and translators who contributed more
than their translation. He was also accused of plagiarism:
On June 22, 1982, two journalists writing in the Village Voice challenged the veracity of Kosinski's basic account of himself. They
challenged his extensive use of private editors in the production of his novels and insinuated that The Painted Bird, his
masterpiece, and Being There, which had been made into a hit movie, had been plagiarized from other sources.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 6)
The accusation that Kosinski's Being There was plagiarized was
particularly easy to document:
In its protagonist, its structure, its specific events, and its conclusion, the book bore an extraordinarily close resemblance to
[Tadeusz] Dolega-Mostowicz's 1932 novel The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, which Kosinski had described with such excitement
two decades earlier to his friend Stanislaw Pomorski. The question of plagiarism is a serious one, and not susceptible of easy
and final answer; ultimately the text of Being There resembles the text of Nikodem Dyzma in ways that, had Dolega-Mostowicz
been alive and interested in pressing the matter, might have challenged law courts as to a reasonable definition of plagiarism.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 292)
As in the case of other great frauds like Stephen Glass, Jerzy Kosinski
for a time appeared unassailable no matter how outrageous his
falsehoods. The reference below is to a letter from Jerzy Kosinski to
The Nation literary editor Betsy Pochoda:
The letter had been riddled with such errors that, in her view, its author could not possibly have been the writer of Kosinski's
award-winning novels. Over the years she had picked up literary gossip about Kosinski's supposed "ghost writers" and had
decided that such gossip was altogether plausible. In early 1982 she shared her opinion with Navasky, and made him a strange
bet. People well enough situated in America, she bet him, could get away with anything, even if their most shameful secrets were
revealed.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 384)
A second condition which might promote the creation of a great liar
might be an environment which condones or even encourages lying.
Sloan demonstrates that at least Jerzy Kosinski's mother did indeed
provided such an environment, and goes on to describe how such
lying may have originated as a survival tactic. Please note that
Sloan's description of the wartime environment which might have
created a subculture based on lying not only provides an excuse for
habitual lying, but provides also an excuse for greeting with a
measure of skepticism some of the more extreme stories told by
immigrants coming from such a subculture. The situation Sloan
describes below is one in which Jerzy Kosinski's career success has
depended upon his telling stories of his youth which his mother,
Elzbieta Kosinski, would know to be untrue, and with the mother
arrived from Poland to dote on her successful son in New York:
At the same time, there was a dilemma to be resolved. By that time he had regaled the entire Polish emigre circle and much of
Mary Wier's New York society with stories of his catastrophic and solitary adventures during the war - the wandering from village
to village, the dog that had leaped at his heels, the loss of speech, the reunion at the orphanage where he was identified by his
resemblance to this mother and the mark on his rib cage. What if conversation got around to those wartime experiences? What,
God forbid, if someone casually asked her where the adult Kosinskis had been during the war? The question had come up, and
he had managed to get away with vague answers. Sweden, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have
escaped there. Maybe they had gotten there by boat.
The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In
the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the
Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother
spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war,
Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears
she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed.
How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family
had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin,
but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans
could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better.
What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of
each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether
visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of
objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or
in life, was whatever worked best.
Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She
had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may
have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories
had become an important part of his personal capital.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172)
And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting
her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son,
Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German
translation of The Painted Bird:
But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she
spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis,
but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable
statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink.
As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to
maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225)
In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his
mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological:
There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made
clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To
a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before
Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure."
Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father
suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the
father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship
bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with
transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130)
Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail.
Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date
with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his
step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV
documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski):
Toward the end of the meal he suggested that the two of them go to Chateau Nineteen, an S-M parlor with which he seemed to be
quite familiar. She agreed on condition that she not be required to participate or remove her clothes. Once they were there, he
moved comfortably among the patrons, chatting as if at a country-club tea. He was particularly friendly with a man who worked in
the jewelry district, who was busy masturbating as they spoke.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 360-361)
An accumulation of incidents points to the conclusion that Jerzy Kosinski was
irresponsible, immature, impulsive, physically abusive toward women, and
generally reckless with the welfare of others. Below are six character-revealing
incidents which taken collectively might have long ago led Jews to write Jerzy
Kosinski off as unfit for leadership, might have long ago led Jews to conclude
that he was too unstable to be trusted as a Holocaust witness, might have long
ago led Jews to conclude that he should be shunned as someone likely to bring
Park Avenue Synagogue
50 East 87 Street
New York, N.Y. 10125
Mr. Jeffrey Fager, Producer
CBS "60 Minutes"
524 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Dear Sir:
I feel that your program on Lviv and Ukrainians was most unfair.
To show boy scouts and say they are Nazis marching, to translate "Zhyd" as kike (in western Ukraine Zhyd is the
word for Jew), to infer that the word for nation - "natsiya" - might mean Nazi etc., etc. - is most upsetting to many
of us who know today's Ukraine.
It really is time for us to enjoy the resurgence of Jewish life in Ukraine after the horrors of the German
occupation and communism, and to appreciate the heroic efforts of the Ukrainian people and government to assist the
Jewish community in all their endeavors.
The history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations often tragic is a complicated one, but you would have done well to have
informed the public of the better aspects of those contacts. For instance, Ukraine was the sole independent nation
that had complete Jewish national autonomy (1917) and had Yiddish-speaking ministers in the government representing
the rights of minorities.
Today, when Russian Jews send their children to Ukraine for safe keeping in times of danger, no good can come
from distortions such as those portrayed in your program.
Yours faithfully,
Rabbi David H. Lincoln
HOME DISINFORMATION POLAND 8359 hits since 04-Feb-1998
Jerzy Kosinski: Grand Calumniator of Poland
Jerzy Kosinski
who the world understood to have been To Hell and Back
The Audie Murphy of the Holocaust
turned out to be little better than the
Grand Calumniator of Poland
Holocaust Witness Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski was once to Poland what Simon Wiesenthal is today to Ukraine. Jerzy Kosinski was the grand calumniator of Poland;
Simon Wiesenthal is the grand calumniator of Ukraine. The Poles have been successful in discrediting their grand calumniator; the Ukrainians
are too timid to attempt to discredit Simon Wiesenthal. The present web page is dedicated to understanding Jerzy Kosinski, to
congratulating the Poles, and to giving courage to Ukrainians.
Who was Jerzy Kosinski? Jerzy Kosinski was born Jerzy Lewinkopf to Mojzesz (Moses) Lewinkopf and Elzbieta Lewinkopf (maiden name
Elzbieta Wanda Weinreich). Six significant dates in Jerzy Kosinski's life were:
1933 born in Lodz, Poland
1959 entered USA on a student visa
1960 published The Future is Ours, Comrade, under pseudonym Joseph Novak
1968 won the National Book Award for The Painted Bird
1982 veracity challenged in Village Voice article, "Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words"
1991 committed suicide
Biographer James Park Sloan
I quote from two sources by the same author. I quote below from two sources, both written by James Park Sloan: (1) the magazine
article, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994; and (2) the book, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996. The
first source provides the first two excerpts below, in blue, which by themselves present the chief features of the Kosinski story. The reader
interested only in a broad outline need not read beyond these first two quotations. The second source provides a number of further
excerpts shown in green, which serve to flesh in a fuller picture. The analogy to Audie Murphy in the above title was taken from p. 227 of
this second source. Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WW II who went on to become a movie star, and played
himself in the autobiographical war film, To Hell and Back.
Who is James Park Sloan? The dust jacket of the Sloan book informs us of the following:
JAMES PARK SLOAN is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a prize-winning
novelist, and a widely published short story writer and critic. He knew Jerzy Kosinski for over twenty years
before Kosinski's death.
A Personal Experience
I recollect, by the way, many years ago talking to a New York Jewish lawyer about Kosinski's book The Painted Bird, partly on the basis of
which this lawyer held the deep conviction that Poles were pretty close to sub-human. When he told me about Kosinski's description of
eyeballs being torn out as an incident that would not be clearly out of place in a Polish household, I replied - to his discomfort - that such
a scene would be about as typical in a Polish household as it would be in an American one. When I added that the only Poles that I had ever
known were intelligent, civilized, and cultured he did not reply, but his manner suggested that I had told him something that was a patent
impossibility.
What's the Relevance?
Why is so much attention given to Jerzy Kosinski below, even to the point of touching on his sexual deviance and other character defects?
As already mentioned above, Kosinski provides a precedent of a calumniator of a Slavic peoples who has been successfully and thoroughly
discredited, and whose example thus may give Ukrainians courage to similarly discredit their many calumniators, chief among whom is Simon
Wiesenthal. Beyond that, however, the Kosinski biography provides unusually detailed information which brings to the fore several
generalizations which may assist in the understanding of the phenomenon of anti-Ukrainian calumny.
The Gang of Ten
Let us begin. Heading the list of anti-Ukrainian calumniators are the following nine: Yitzhak Arad, Dov Ben-Meir, Yaakov Bleich, Alan
Dershowitz, Sol Littman, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal. If we expand this list to include prominent calumniators
of Slavs, Jerzy Kosinski makes it a list of ten. In order to express my disapproval of these individuals, and in order to encourage in Slavs in
general, and in Ukrainians in particular, an attitude of bold intolerance toward their misdeeds, I propose that they be called "the gang of ten,"
as I myself do below.
Incidentally, the link to Sol Littman above will take the reader to the very section in "The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes" that deals with Littman,
but only when using a Netscape browser - readers relying on other browsers will have to use CTRL+F to get down to the section titled "Sol
Littman's Mengele Scare."
Examining the gang of ten, it is possible to arrive at several generalizations, the chief of which may be the following:
(1) The gang of ten is Jewish. One notices immediately that all ten of these calumniators of the Slavs are Jewish. This
observation reminds us that in examining those who were responsible for the 23Oct94 60 Minutes story, The Ugly Face of Freedom, seven
out of seven of those in the chain of command proved to be Jews (three being common to both lists).
But are there any non-Jewish calumniators? Of course there are, and where I find them, I impartially include them on the Ukrainian Archive.
Trouble is, I don't find many, and their calumniation does not rank as high. One of these is University of Toronto historian Robert Magocsi,
and another is Harvard University historian Omeljan Pritsak. Offhand, I can't think of any others. But while Magocsi and Pritsak distort, they
cannot compare with any of the gang of ten (or with any of the CBS gang of seven). The really egregious calumniation comes only from
Jews.
Henryk Sienkiewicz. Henryk Sienkiewicz (among my favorite novelists for his Quo Vadis) comes to mind as a Polish calumniator of Ukraine
(in his novel about Bohdan Khmelnytsky, With Fire and Sword), but he is not discussed on the Ukrainian Archive primarily because he is not
contemporary, and also because, like Magocsi and Pritsak, he is more subtle. The Ukrainian Archive restricts attention to contemporaries
whose calumniation is egregious.
The Ukrainian archive does not focus on Jews. It has been more than once remarked that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on Jews, which
is incorrect - which is no more than an additional calumniation of Ukrainians. The truth is that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on
calumniators, and it incidentally happens that the chief of these are Jews. If the leading calumniators of Ukraine had proven to be Czechs or
Poles or Romanians or Hungarians or Russians or Germans or Armenians or Iranians or Palestinians or Chinese or whatever, I would have
impartially and disinterestedly featured them instead of Jews. If someone can bring to my attention prominent contemporary non-Jewish
calumniators of Ukraine that I have been overlooking, I will gladly give them generous representation on the Ukrainian Archive, and if such
non-Jewish calumniators overwhelm the Jewish calumniators by their numbers, then all the better. The prominence of Jews on the Ukrainian
Archive is not to be explained by looking into my psyche, it is to be explained by examining the characteristics of calumniators of Ukraine. It
is not for me to justify why Jews appear so frequently on the pages of the Ukrainian Archive, it is for Jews to explain why no Gentiles can be
found whose anti-Slavic calumnies are able to compete with those of the Jews in the gang of ten (or with those of the Jews in the CBS gang
of seven).
(2) The gang of ten is prominent. One notices too that these are not ten obscure Jews, but highly placed ones. Their
names are recognizable. They constitute a Jewish leadership. They hold high office within the Jewish community, or within society
generally. Two have been spoken of as candidates for Nobel prizes. They frequently appear on television or are quoted in the media or are
cited in the discussion of Jewish affairs. Perhaps the only other Jews who equal or exceed them in prominence fall into three categories: (i)
Jews functioning in a non-Jewish capacity, as for example musicians and scientists; (ii) North American Jewish politicians, particularly
Congressmen, Senators, or Mayors in the United States, but again functioning only in small part as Jewish representatives; and (iii) Israeli
politicians and military leaders. However, restricting our attention to Jews who live in, or who are influential in, North America, and to those
who appear expressly as representatives of Jewish interests, the gang of ten constitutes a dominant clan. They set the agenda for
Jewish-Slavic dialogue. Even the one who lives in Austria (Simon Wiesenthal), and the two who live in Israel (Yitzhak Arad and Dov
Ben-Meir), are able to make their presence felt in North America either during their visits, or in being covered by the media, or by means of
their court room testimony either in Israel or in North America. American Jews such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are also highly
prominent, and do speak on Jewish affairs, but speak primarily of the State of Israel, and - unfortunately - have little to say about the
Slavic world. Overwhelmingly, the Jews who step forward to speak on the Slavs do so only to calumniate. Whereas individual Jews have
occasionally stepped forward to defend Ukrainians, I know of none who does so on an ongoing basis the way that the gang of ten defames
Ukrainians on an ongoing basis.
Raul Hilberg. Jewish historian Raul Hilberg deserves mention as falling in a class by himself. I do not agree with everything he says, but in
cases where I disagree, I do not regard Hilberg as guilty of calumny, but only as falling within the range of responsible but divergent opinion
which is to be expected upon any historical question. Raul Hilberg has amply demonstrated that he is ready to be guided by the evidence to
conclusions without regard to whether they are palatable to Jews or Germans or Ukrainians or other involved parties.
(3) The gang of ten is typified by deception. I understand calumniation to mean damaging utterances characterized
by untruth. An utterance that is true, I do not characterize as calumny no matter how damaging. To not mince words, then, the gang of
ten is a pack of liars. The most fantastic, the most childish, the most palpably untrue statements spew from their lips in profusion, as is
amply documented on the Ukrainian Archive. They suppress evidence, they create historical events out of thin air, they contradict
themselves from one recitation to the next.
(4) The gang of ten enjoys impunity for lying. When the deceptions of any of these calumniators are brought to
their attention, or to public attention, the refutations are ignored. The ten calumniators appear to be able to say whatever untruths they
want with little fear of punishment or censure or even embarrassment. They rarely have to correct their misstatements, or to retract them,
or to apologize for them. Of the ten, only Jerzy Kosinski has lost his impunity, but he did nevertheless enjoy a large measure of impunity over
many years of his professional calumniation. The generalization, therefore, is not that the gang of ten enjoy absolute and permanent
impunity, but only that they enjoy surprising measures of impunity over surprising intervals of time.
(5) The gang of ten is typified by modest intellectual capacity. On the whole, the members of the gang of
ten have the minds of children. This is demonstrated primarily in their lying which is primitive and palpable, and which is not merely
occasional, but which permeates their thinking. On top of that, their speech and their writing tends to be illogical to the point of
incoherence. They are strangers to the ideal of being constrained by logic. They don't know the facts, and they don't rely on facts. In not
a single case have I come across anything any of them might have said or written touching on Ukrainian-Jewish relations that one would be
forced to admire - or so much as respect - for its reasoning or its data or its expression. Given their prominence and their power, their
academic and intellectual accomplishments, on the whole, are unimpressive. The bulk of their writing would get C's or worse if submitted in
freshman courses in history or political science or journalism. The only one of the ten to achieve an unambiguous distinction outside his
calumniation activities is Alan Dershowitz - Harvard law professor, media star, defender of O. J. Simpson. He alone among the ten must be
acknowledged to have substantial academic qualifications and to show flashes of intelligence and wit. However, restricting myself to his
statements on Ukrainians or Palestinians, I find Dershowitz's thinking fully as primitive and as childishly self-serving and as duplicitous as that
of the other nine.
The incongruity between low desert and high reward is particularly great in the case of Jerzy Kosinski; the evidence below will demonstrate
that in addition to lacking academic capacity, and in addition to lacking literary skills, every area of his life was crippled by immaturity,
irresponsibility, deception, and perversion.
What picture emerges?
Is there any way of tying all of the above generalizations into a single coherent picture? Why should it be the case that the leading
slanderers of Ukrainians are all Jewish? How can it be that Jewish leaders are so prone to lying, and have such palpable intellectual
shortcomings, and sometimes even remarkable character defects? How does it come to pass that they are permitted to incite hatred against
Ukrainians with impunity? The answers to these questions can be found throughout the Ukrainian Archive.
An individual Pole is persecuted by Simon Wiesenthal
Jerzy Kosinski calumniated the Polish people collectively. Simon Wiesenthal persecuted a single Pole - Frank Walus - individually.
Time For the Quotes
And now for the quotations from Sloan's article:
Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" was celebrated for its "overpowering
authenticity":
"Jerzy was a fantastic liar," said Agnieszka Osiecka, Poland's leading pop lyricist and a familiar figure in Polish intellectual
circles.... If you told Jerzy you had a Romanian grandmother, he would come back that he had fifteen cousins all more Romanian
than your grandmother ... and they played in a Gypsy band!"
Osiecka was responding to a recent expose by the Polish journalist Joanna Siedlecka, in which she argued that Jerzy Kosinski,
Poland's best-known Holocaust survivor, had profoundly falsified his wartime experiences. According to Siedlecka, Kosinski
spent the war years in relatively gentle, if hardly idyllic, circumstances and was never significantly mistreated. She thus
contradicts the sanctioned version of his life under the German occupation, which has generally been assumed to be only thinly
disguised in his classic first novel, "The Painted Bird," published in this country by Houghton Mifflin in 1965. ...
In stark, uninflected prose, "The Painted Bird" describes the disasters that befall a six-year-old boy who is separated from his
parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of his
wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A farmer
forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the book, the boy
drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and is flung by the angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit,
he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. ...
"Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant account transcends confession," Elie Wiesel wrote in the Times Book
Review. At the time of Kosinski's suicide, in 1991, Wiesel said, "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography
I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."
Wiesel's review sanctified the work as a valid testament of the Holocaust, more horrible, more revealing - in a sense, truer
than the literature that came out of the camps. Other writers and critics agreed. Harry Overstreet wrote that "The Painted Bird"
would "stand by the side of Anne Frank's unforgettable 'Diary'" as "a powerfully poignant human document," while Peter Prescott,
also comparing it to Anne Frank's "Diary," called the book "a testament not only to the atrocities of the war, but to the failings of
human nature." The novelist James Leo Herlihy saluted it as "brilliant testimony to mankind's survival power."
"Account," "confession," "testament," "document," "testimony": these were the key words in the book's critical reception. What
made "The Painted Bird" such an important book was its overpowering authenticity. Perhaps it wasn't exactly a diary
six-year-olds don't keep diaries - but it was the next best thing. And in one respect it was better: Kosinski was Anne Frank as a
survivor, walking among us.
"The Painted Bird" was translated into almost every major language and many obscure ones. It was a best-seller in Germany
and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. It became the cornerstone or reading lists in university courses on the
Holocaust, where it was often treated as a historical document, and, as a result, it has been for a generation the source of what
many people "know" about Poland under the German occupation. At the height of Kosinski's reputation, there were those who
said that somewhere down the road Kosinski was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 46-47)
But turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth:
According to Joanna Siedlecka ..., Kosinski's wrenching accounts of his wartime experiences were fabricated from whole cloth.
... Siedlecka contends that Kosinski spent the war with his family his mother, father, and later, an adopted brother - and that
they lived in relative security and comfort.
The Kosinskis survived, she suggests, in part because Jerzy Kosinski's father, whose original name was Moses Lewinkopf, saw
bad times coming and acquired false papers in the common Gentile name of Kosinski; in part because they had money ... and
were able to pay for protection with cash and jewelry; and in part because a network of Polish Catholics, at great risk to
themselves, helped hide them.
Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have
collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the N.K.V.D., after the liberation of Dabrowa by
the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her
real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire
Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski
spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa - goods unavailable to the neighbors' children - in the safety of his
house and yard....
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, p. 48)
Right from the start, Kosinski wrote under duress - an impecunious young man,
particularly situated to be of use to clandestine forces, he could leapfrog to
advancement only by cooperating with these forces. Thus, his first book, the
Future is Ours, Comrade (1960), was published under the pseudonym Joseph
Novak, and appears to have been sponsored by the CIA:
Czartoryski recommends Kosinski to the CIA.
Between Kosinski's penchant for telling more than the truth and the CIA's adamant insistence on telling as little as possible, the
specific financial arrangements concerning the "book on Russia" may never be made public. Indeed, full documentation probably
does not exist. A number of facts, however, argue strongly that there was CIA/USIA intermediation on behalf of the book, with or
without Kosinski's full knowledge and understanding. One major piece of evidence is the name of the original titleholder on the
Doubleday contract: Anthony B. Czartoryski. A further clue was the address to which communications for "Czartoryski" were to be
delivered: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America at 145 East Fifty-third Street.
The clear presumption is that Czartoryski became aware of Kosinski's notes, suggested the possibility of a book to his contacts
within the CIA, and then had the manuscript delivered to Doubleday, which already was quite familiar with arrangements of this
nature; Gibney served unwittingly to protect the author's identity and the manuscript's origin.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 112)
Surprisingly quick production.
As for the book, not only its instant acceptance but its quick production would remain a mystery for many years. How could a
graduate student at Columbia - struggling with his course work, engaged in various side projects as a translator, and busy with
the details of life in a strange country - how could such a person have turned out a copy that could be serialized in the editorially
meticulous Reader's Digest in less than two years?
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 117)
Exactly what the CIA would have wanted.
All in all, the book is everything an American propaganda agency, or the propaganda arm of the CIA, might have hoped for in its
wildest dreams. In broad perspective, it outlines the miserable conditions under which Soviet citizens are compelled to live their
everyday lives. It shows how the spiritual greatness of the Russian people is undermined and persecuted by Communism. It
describes a material deprivation appalling by 1960s American standards and a lack of privacy and personal freedom calculated to
shock American audiences. The Russia of The Future is Ours is clearly a place where no American in his right mind would ever
want to live.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 129-130)
As Kosinski's veracity in The Painted Bird came increasingly under question, his
support came most noticeably from Jews, reinforcing the hypothesis of a Jewish
tendency to side with coreligionists rather than with truth, despite the consequent
lowering of Jewish credibility:
Byron Sherwin at Spertus also checked in with his support, reaffirming an invitation to Kosinski to appear as the Spertus award
recipient at their annual fund-raiser in October, before 1,500 guests at Chicago's Hyatt Regency. He mentioned a list of notable
predecessors including Arthur Goldberg, Elie Wiesel, Philip Klutznick, Yitzhak Rabin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel himself; the
1978 recipient, Isaac Bashevis Singer, had recently won the Nobel Prize. Kosinski was deeply moved by this support from
Sherwin and Spertus, and its direct fallout was a move to make Spertus the ultimate site for his personal papers, with Sherwin
serving as coexecutor of his estate. At the same time it accelerated his movement back toward his Jewish roots. In his greatest
moment of crisis, the strongest support had come not from his fellow intellectuals, but from those who identified with him as a
Jew.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 389)
Not only did the Jews get mileage out of The Painted Bird, but so did the
Germans, at the expense of the Poles, of course:
The German edition was a hit.
The book was doing reasonably well in England and France, better certainly than in America, but the German edition was an
out-and-out hit. For a Germany struggling to shuck off the collective national guilt for World War II and the Holocaust, its focus on
the "Eastern European" peasants may have suggested that sadistic behavior and genocide were not a national trait or the crime
of a specific group but part of a universally distributed human depravity; a gentler view is that the book became part of a
continuing German examination of the war years. Perhaps both views reflect aspects of the book's success in Germany, where
Der bemalte Vogel actually made it onto bestseller lists.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 234)
Attempt to dilute German guilt.
The Warsaw magazine Forum compared Kosinski to Goebbels and Senator McCarthy and emphasized a particular sore point for
Poles: the relatively sympathetic treatment of a German soldier. Kosinski, the review argued, put himself on the side of the
Hitlerites, who saw their crimes as the work of "pacifiers of a primitive pre-historic jungle." Glos Nauczycielski, the weekly
publication of the teaching profession, took the same line, accusing The Painted Bird of an attempt "to dilute the German guilt for
the crime of genocide by including the supposed guilt of all other Europeans and particularly those from Eastern Europe."
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 236)
Although Sloan does not speculate that the French may have had similar motives
to the Germans for promoting Kosinski's book, we have already seen the French
buying protection from accusations of complicity in the Holocaust, and wonder
whether the high honor they paid The Painted Bird may not have been motivated
to further deflect attention from their own collaboration:
Kosinski returned to New York on April 14, and only two weeks later received the best news of all from Europe. On May 2,
Flammarion cabled Houghton Mifflin that L'Oiseau bariole had been awarded the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger - the annual
award given in France for the best foreign book of the year. Previous winners included Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, Heinrich
Boll, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Lewis, Angus Wilson, and Nikos Kazantzakis. New York might be the center of publishing, but
Paris was still, to many minds, the intellectual center of the universe, and Kosinski had swept the French intellectual world off its
feet. Any who had doubted the aesthetic merits of The Painted Bird were now shamed into silence. The authority of the "eleven
distinguished jurors" was an absolute in New York as in Paris; Kosinski's first novel had swept the board.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 234-235)
The question has been raised on the Ukrainian Archive of what
conditions are likely to lead to the creation of a great liar. One such
condition might be a modest intellectual endowment which limits the
achievement that is possible by legitimate means. In Jerzy Kosinski's
case, Sloan drops many clues indicating that Kosinski's academic
career was a disaster, among these clues being political maneuvering
on Kosinski's part as a substitute for performance, which
maneuvering occasionally degenerated into "the dog ate my
homework" quality excuses, in this case being made on Kosinski's
behalf by patron Strzetelski:
Kosinski had used his time fruitfully, Strzetelski argued, in spite of his impaired health and "the accident (combustion of his right
hand) which made him unable to write during almost the whole 1959 Spring Session." It was the first and last mention in the file
of the injury to Kosinski's hand, which had not impaired his ability to produce lengthy correspondence.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 123)
Kosinski was unable to rise to academic standards. He disappointed
his friends. He was shunned by responsible scholars:
Unlike Kosinski, Krauze took the discipline of sociology very seriously; he was deeply committed to his studies, and it troubled
him that Kosinski was so blithely dismissive of its rigor and of the hurdles required in getting the Ph.D. By then Kosinski was busy
looking at alternative ways to get approval of his dissertation. One of them involved Feliks Gross: he proposed a transfer to
CCNY, where he would finish his doctorate under Gross's supervision. In Krauze's view, Kosinski had simply run into a buzzsaw
in Lazarsfeld, his Columbia supervisor, a man who could not be charmed into dropping the rigor of his requirements. Gross too
promptly grasped that Kosinski was trying to get around the question of methodological rigor; he politely demurred and excused
himself from being a part of it.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 169)
The pedestrian task of writing an examination, for Kosinski became a
trauma, and his capacity for academic work deteriorated to the level
of the pitiable:
[H]e had neglected the necessary preparation for his doctoral qualifying exam, the deadline for which now loomed.
On February 19 [1963] Kosinski sat for the examination as required. Midway through, he informed the proctor that he was unable
to continue. [...] [H]is flight from the doctoral exam marked a low point in his life in America - his academic career blocked, with
no alternative in sight.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 186)
But Kosinski was not only a student who could not study - he was
also, and more importantly, a writer who could not write:
Kosinski did well enough in spoken English, to be sure; his accent and his occasional Slavicisms were charming. But writing was
a different matter. He was, quite simply, no Conrad. In writing English, the omission of articles or the clustering of modifiers did
not strike readers as charming; instead, it made the writer appear ignorant, half-educated, even stupid. Conrad wrote like an
angel but could not make himself understood when he opened his mouth; with Kosinski, it was exactly the other way around.
Which might not have been such a handicap had not Kosinski been a writer by profession.
From the beginning of his life as a professional writer, Kosinski had to protect a terrible secret: He could not write competently in
the language in which he was published. Whenever he wrote a simple business letter, his reputation was at risk. Even a letter he
wrote to his British agent, Peter Janson-Smith, required a hasty followup; the solecisms and grammatical errors were explained
as the result of failure to proofread.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 174)
In view of Kosinski's inability to write, it is little wonder that he was
accused of using ghost writers and translators who contributed more
than their translation. He was also accused of plagiarism:
On June 22, 1982, two journalists writing in the Village Voice challenged the veracity of Kosinski's basic account of himself. They
challenged his extensive use of private editors in the production of his novels and insinuated that The Painted Bird, his
masterpiece, and Being There, which had been made into a hit movie, had been plagiarized from other sources.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 6)
The accusation that Kosinski's Being There was plagiarized was
particularly easy to document:
In its protagonist, its structure, its specific events, and its conclusion, the book bore an extraordinarily close resemblance to
[Tadeusz] Dolega-Mostowicz's 1932 novel The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, which Kosinski had described with such excitement
two decades earlier to his friend Stanislaw Pomorski. The question of plagiarism is a serious one, and not susceptible of easy
and final answer; ultimately the text of Being There resembles the text of Nikodem Dyzma in ways that, had Dolega-Mostowicz
been alive and interested in pressing the matter, might have challenged law courts as to a reasonable definition of plagiarism.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 292)
As in the case of other great frauds like Stephen Glass, Jerzy Kosinski
for a time appeared unassailable no matter how outrageous his
falsehoods. The reference below is to a letter from Jerzy Kosinski to
The Nation literary editor Betsy Pochoda:
The letter had been riddled with such errors that, in her view, its author could not possibly have been the writer of Kosinski's
award-winning novels. Over the years she had picked up literary gossip about Kosinski's supposed "ghost writers" and had
decided that such gossip was altogether plausible. In early 1982 she shared her opinion with Navasky, and made him a strange
bet. People well enough situated in America, she bet him, could get away with anything, even if their most shameful secrets were
revealed.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 384)
A second condition which might promote the creation of a great liar
might be an environment which condones or even encourages lying.
Sloan demonstrates that at least Jerzy Kosinski's mother did indeed
provided such an environment, and goes on to describe how such
lying may have originated as a survival tactic. Please note that
Sloan's description of the wartime environment which might have
created a subculture based on lying not only provides an excuse for
habitual lying, but provides also an excuse for greeting with a
measure of skepticism some of the more extreme stories told by
immigrants coming from such a subculture. The situation Sloan
describes below is one in which Jerzy Kosinski's career success has
depended upon his telling stories of his youth which his mother,
Elzbieta Kosinski, would know to be untrue, and with the mother
arrived from Poland to dote on her successful son in New York:
At the same time, there was a dilemma to be resolved. By that time he had regaled the entire Polish emigre circle and much of
Mary Wier's New York society with stories of his catastrophic and solitary adventures during the war - the wandering from village
to village, the dog that had leaped at his heels, the loss of speech, the reunion at the orphanage where he was identified by his
resemblance to this mother and the mark on his rib cage. What if conversation got around to those wartime experiences? What,
God forbid, if someone casually asked her where the adult Kosinskis had been during the war? The question had come up, and
he had managed to get away with vague answers. Sweden, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have
escaped there. Maybe they had gotten there by boat.
The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In
the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the
Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother
spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war,
Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears
she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed.
How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family
had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin,
but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans
could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better.
What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of
each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether
visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of
objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or
in life, was whatever worked best.
Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She
had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may
have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories
had become an important part of his personal capital.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172)
And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting
her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son,
Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German
translation of The Painted Bird:
But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she
spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis,
but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable
statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink.
As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to
maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225)
In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his
mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological:
There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made
clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To
a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before
Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure."
Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father
suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the
father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship
bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with
transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130)
Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail.
Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date
with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his
step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV
documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski):
Toward the end of the meal he suggested that the two of them go to Chateau Nineteen, an S-M parlor with which he seemed to be
quite familiar. She agreed on condition that she not be required to participate or remove her clothes. Once they were there, he
moved comfortably among the patrons, chatting as if at a country-club tea. He was particularly friendly with a man who worked in
the jewelry district, who was busy masturbating as they spoke.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 360-361)
An accumulation of incidents points to the conclusion that Jerzy Kosinski was
irresponsible, immature, impulsive, physically abusive toward women, and
generally reckless with the welfare of others. Below are six character-revealing
incidents which taken collectively might have long ago led Jews to write Jerzy
Kosinski off as unfit for leadership, might have long ago led Jews to conclude
that he was too unstable to be trusted as a Holocaust witness, might have long
ago led Jews to conclude that he should be shunned as someone likely to bring