Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

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