Jerzy Kosinski, Who Was Born on June

Jerzy Kosinski, who was born on June 18, 1933 and who died on May e, 1991, was a novelist born in Lodz, Poland (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1996. Although born to a Jewish family, a sympathetic Catholic priest provided a forged baptismal certificate at the onsent of World War II so he would be safe from the Holocaust (Wikipedia, 2005). His family hid in the countryside and were not discovered by the Nazis (Wikipedia, 2005). Kosinski paid a high price, because he learned at an early age that he could survive by pretending he was someone he was not (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1996.

After emigrating to the United States in 1957, Kosinski began telling an embellished story of how he survived World War II to those he met (Phillips, 2001). Eventually he wrote a novel, The Painted Bird, widely believed to be an autobiographical story of how he survived the Nazi occupation of Poland (Phillips, 2001). The book describes years of horrific experiences, including sexual perversion, violence and cruelty. The experiences are so severe that the protagonist, a child, becomes mute, and does not speak again until reunited with his parents (Behrens, 1996). Some critics saw The Painted Bird as a Holocaust document, comparable to The Diary of Anne Frank. In 1965 it received the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the French award for the best foreign book of the year (Behrens, 1996).

The reality was that Kosinski had spent the war with a Polish Catholic family that hid his true identity (Wikipedia, 2005), and that they sheltered his family as well (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1996. He had never been mistreated and had never been separated from his parents. However, in interviews and through other forums, when interviewers represented the book as autobiographical he did not correct them, and even had his childhood picture put on the cover of one of the editions (Phillips, 2001). The book was celebrated as a report of the Holocaust equal in importance to The Diary of Anne Frank, and it received a prestigious French ward in 1965 (Behrens, 1996).

But an even worse literary charge was eventually made about Kosinski. In 1982 the New York Newspaper Village Voice wrote an expose about him in which they claimed that his novel Being There plagiarized the work of Polish writers the American public were unaware of (Wikipedia, 2005). Kosinski's novel is remarkably similar to The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma, which was written by a Polish writer by the name of Mostowicz in 1932 (Wikipedia, 2005).

The Village Voice demonstrated that Kosinski had misrepresented The Painted Bird and reported the conflicting stories he had told about those war years. The Voice suggested that in fact Kosinski had never been mute, a fact later proven (Phillips, 2001). It was never clear why Kosinski felt the need to embroider on his youthful events, which must have been remarkable if presented as they really happened. Even worse, the paper suggested that others had written much of what he claimed as his own -- to the point that they might have been ghost written, and finally, that he had some kind of connection to the CIA (Wikipedia, 2005). In spite of these questions, Being There was made into a successful movie in 1979.

In Kosinski's final years, he devoted a significant amount of time to building not-for-profit organizations to promote Polish-Jewish arts (Phillips, 2001).