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: