The court said the FCC misapplied its standard for holding a hearing
because it required Serafyn to demonstrate that CBS intended to distort
the news rather than merely requiring that he "raise a substantial and
material question of fact" - a less demanding test.
CBS attorneys asserted there was no evidence the network intentionally
distorted the segment. In addition, they said the FCC has never revoked
a broadcast license on such grounds.
The broadcast angered some viewers who believed that parts had been
designed to give the impression that all Ukrainians harbor a strongly
negative attitude toward Jews, the court said.
"This is basically an effort on the part of the Ukrainian community,"
said Arthur Belendiuk, Serafyn's attorney. "The case is not so much
about Mr. Serafyn as it is about a community that felt horribly
maligned
by what was said."
After the FCC revisits the case, the commission has several options: It
could issue a new order that basically upholds its 1995 order but
provides more details on how the decision was reached; it could order a
hearing on the matter; or it could ask interested parties to comment
and
then it could issue a new order, the FCC attorney said.
Whatever the commission ultimately decides is likely to be appealed by
the losing party, Belendiuk and other attorneys said.
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1156 hits since 12May98
Rabbi David H. Lincoln Ukrainian Weekly 30October94 A New York rabbi's
response
Rabbi David H. Lincoln of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York was
among the first to object to the 60 Minutes
broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of 23Oct94. Rabbi Lincoln has had a
longstanding interest in Ukraine, inherited
from his father, as is explained in the discussion of The Ukrainian
Question in 1935.
Everything below is from the Ukrainian Weekly.
A New York rabbi's response
Following is the text of a letter sent on October 25 to the CBS program
"60 Minutes" by Rabbi David H. Lincoln of
the Park Avenue Synagogue. The letter is reprinted here with the
permission of Rabbi Lincoln, who last year traveled
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. Swede