The Painted Bird (novel)
Encyclopedia
The Painted Bird is a controversial 1965 novel
by Jerzy Kosiński
which describes the world as seen by a young boy, "considered a Gypsy or Jewish stray," who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland
) during World War II
.
In the next village, he is disgusted by sexual activities of a woman who takes care of him. Soviet deserters come to the village. They rape and murder the locals. The boy decides that God has not helped him because he is of the same kind as the black-haired Kalmuks. Soon, the Red Army arrives. The boy stays with them and decides to become a communist. He determines that revenge is a responsibility one must take. When the war ends, he is sent to an orphanage, where he pretends to be Russian and refuses to learn reading and writing. The boy's parents find him there and take him home. He resents having to give up his freedom, breaks another orphan's arm, and joins the people who roam the streets at night, gambling, drinking, and having sex. He moves in with an old ski instructor. While skiing, he falls, and is sent to a hospital. There, he feels an overwhelming desire to speak again. The novel ends as he regains his speech.
, the novel was "described by Arthur Miller
and Elie Wiesel
as one of the most important books in the so-called Holocaust literature." Wiesel wrote in The New York Times
Book Review that it was: "One of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity" Richard Kluger
, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine
, wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering ... one of the most powerful books I have ever read". And Jonathan Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald
, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives". "Cynthia Ozick
later gushed" – wrote Norman Finkelstein
– "that she 'immediately' recognized Kosiński's authenticity as 'a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust'." Time
magazine included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005", accentuating the alleged atrocities perceived by the protagonist.
Soon after the book was translated and published in Poland (where it was banned for 23 years), the Polish couple who rescued Kosiński (then Josef Lewinkopf) during the war, became highly indignant about how they were depicted even though in German occupied Poland any kind of help to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punishable by death often for the whole family. They recognized the names of Jewish children sheltered by them (who also survived the war), presented in the novel as victims of abuse by characters based on them. They informed the press about the fact that Kosiński "had lived through the years of Nazi occupation not only in safety, but in comfort" under their protection. Jerzy was baptized and received Holy Communion; he served as an altar boy. His parents even employed a maid. Summing up the ensuing reception of the book in Poland, Phillip Routh wrote: "The Poles branded Jerzy Kosiński a Holocaust profiteer because the novel, which drew comparison with The Diary of Anne Frank, was immediately granted the status of a chronicle of the Holocaust," while – at the same time – exciting a form of lust reminiscent of the extreme part of modern day Holocaust pornography
.
"Perhaps the most surprising element of this aspect of Kosiński's mystifications is that he obtained from his mother, who was still alive in Poland – the father had died by the time The Painted Bird was published – a letter corroborating the claim that he had been separated from his family during the war."
Norman Finkelstein
, former professor of political science
at DePaul University
, wrote in The Holocaust Industry
: "Long after Kosiński was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his "remarkable body of work." Finkelstein wrote that Kosiński's book “depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic” even though they were fully aware of his Jewishness and “the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.”
The book's reception in Poland was far from uniform nevertheless. The Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw
professor, Paweł Dudziak, noted that the Painted Bird is a great, if controversial piece. He stressed that since the book is surreal – a fictional tale – and does not present, or claim to present - real world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment are nothing but a misunderstanding of the book by those who take it too literally.
, contemporary American
writer, essayist, editor
, and translator, Kosiński was not the author of the book. Weinberger alleged in his collection Karmic Traces that Kosiński had very little fluent knowledge of English at the time of its writing.
M.A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger's assertion by saying:
"Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right."
, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. (Being There, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy - The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma
, a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz). The article also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic
differences among Kosiński's novels. The New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey
, who in Kosiński's American biographer James Sloan
's opinion was embittered by his own lack of literary success, claimed to have written The Painted Bird. Reavey
's assertions were ignored by the press.
The Village Voice article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust
– a view which was later supported by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka
, and Sloan. The article revealed that The Painted Bird, assumed by reviewers to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. The article maintained that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never been appreciably mistreated.
Terence Blacker
, an English
publisher of Kosiński's books and an author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in response to the article's accusations in 2002:
D. G. Myers responded to Blacker's assertions in his review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan:
The journalist John Corry, being himself a controversial author,http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EFDE1430F933A05752C0A962958260, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in the New York Times in November 1982, defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the "Arts and Leisure" section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that "Kosiński was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation
campaign."
The book was published and marketed as a fictional work although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II
. Only later did it become clear to most reviewers that Kosiński was neither the boy in the story nor did he share any of the boy's experiences, as revealed in a series of articles in newspapers and books.(2) The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional. D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, reviewing a biography of Kosiński noted that initially the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin
, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences." According to James Park Sloan, by the time the book was going into publication, Kosiński refrained from making further claims of the book being autobiographical – in a letter to de Santillana and in a subsequent author's note to the book itself. Kosinski nonetheless continued to assert that characterizing the novel as autobiographical "may be convenient for classification, but is not easily justified" (the same language he used in his author's note and his pre-publication correspondence with de Santillana) in later interviews during his life.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Jerzy Kosiński
Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosiński , born Józef Lewinkopf, was an award-winning Polish American novelist, and two-time President of the American Chapter of P.E.N.He was known for various novels, among them The Painted Bird and Being There...
which describes the world as seen by a young boy, "considered a Gypsy or Jewish stray," who wanders about small towns scattered around Central or Eastern Europe (presumably Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
) during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Major themes
The book describes the wandering boy's encounters with peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality and rape, and in a huge amount of violence exciting a form of lust. The book title was drawn from an incident within its content. The boy, while in the company of a professional bird catcher, observes how the man took one of his captured birds and painted it several colors. Then he released the bird to fly in search of a flock of its kin, but when it came upon them, they saw it as an intruder and tore at the bird until it fell from the sky.The plot
World War II has begun. A boy is sent to live in a village while his parents go into hiding from the Nazis. A woman who takes care of him, dies, leaving the boy to fend for himself. He is soon taken in by various individuals including a miller who gouges out his plowboy's eyes, and a man who sells birds. He walks to a village occupied by German soldiers. The local partisans turn him over to the Nazis. A soldier allows him to escape. The boy moves to another village, where he sees trains with Jews and Gypsies heading to concentration camps. He decides that fair-haired, blue-eyed people are God's favorites. He is handed over to a farmer in the nearby village. Soon, he becomes an altar boy. Angry peasants insist he is a vampire and throw him into a manure pit. He becomes mute. The priest sends him to yet another farmer. The boy watches the farmer's nineteen-year-old daughter have sex with a goat under the direction of her father. He leaves, when he sees her having sex with her brother.In the next village, he is disgusted by sexual activities of a woman who takes care of him. Soviet deserters come to the village. They rape and murder the locals. The boy decides that God has not helped him because he is of the same kind as the black-haired Kalmuks. Soon, the Red Army arrives. The boy stays with them and decides to become a communist. He determines that revenge is a responsibility one must take. When the war ends, he is sent to an orphanage, where he pretends to be Russian and refuses to learn reading and writing. The boy's parents find him there and take him home. He resents having to give up his freedom, breaks another orphan's arm, and joins the people who roam the streets at night, gambling, drinking, and having sex. He moves in with an old ski instructor. While skiing, he falls, and is sent to a hospital. There, he feels an overwhelming desire to speak again. The novel ends as he regains his speech.
Literary significance & criticism
According to the filmmaker Agnieszka PiotrowskaAgnieszka Piotrowska
Agnieszka Piotrowska is a BBC trained documentary filmmaker. She was amongst the 30 most successful creative Polish people featured in the recent exhibition at the Barbican¹s Museum of London entitled London Creatives/Polish Roots organised in conjunction with the Polish Cultural...
, the novel was "described by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
and Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel
Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...
as one of the most important books in the so-called Holocaust literature." Wiesel wrote in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Book Review that it was: "One of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity" Richard Kluger
Richard Kluger
Richard Kluger worked as a journalist before becoming an accomplished Pulitzer Prize-winning author and book publisher.-Journalism:...
, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering ... one of the most powerful books I have ever read". And Jonathan Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald
The Miami Herald
The Miami Herald is a daily newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company headquartered on Biscayne Bay in the Omni district of Downtown Miami, Florida, United States...
, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives". "Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.-Background:Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children...
later gushed" – wrote Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
– "that she 'immediately' recognized Kosiński's authenticity as 'a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust'." Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005", accentuating the alleged atrocities perceived by the protagonist.
Soon after the book was translated and published in Poland (where it was banned for 23 years), the Polish couple who rescued Kosiński (then Josef Lewinkopf) during the war, became highly indignant about how they were depicted even though in German occupied Poland any kind of help to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punishable by death often for the whole family. They recognized the names of Jewish children sheltered by them (who also survived the war), presented in the novel as victims of abuse by characters based on them. They informed the press about the fact that Kosiński "had lived through the years of Nazi occupation not only in safety, but in comfort" under their protection. Jerzy was baptized and received Holy Communion; he served as an altar boy. His parents even employed a maid. Summing up the ensuing reception of the book in Poland, Phillip Routh wrote: "The Poles branded Jerzy Kosiński a Holocaust profiteer because the novel, which drew comparison with The Diary of Anne Frank, was immediately granted the status of a chronicle of the Holocaust," while – at the same time – exciting a form of lust reminiscent of the extreme part of modern day Holocaust pornography
Holocaust pornography
Holocaust pornography, known also as "Stalag porn", following the 1955 publication of the The House of Dolls, functions at the extreme end of Jewish pornography....
.
"Perhaps the most surprising element of this aspect of Kosiński's mystifications is that he obtained from his mother, who was still alive in Poland – the father had died by the time The Painted Bird was published – a letter corroborating the claim that he had been separated from his family during the war."
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University...
, former professor of political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
at DePaul University
DePaul University
DePaul University is a private institution of higher education and research in Chicago, Illinois. Founded by the Vincentians in 1898, the university takes its name from the 17th century French priest Saint Vincent de Paul...
, wrote in The Holocaust Industry
The Holocaust Industry
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book published in 2000 by Norman G. Finkelstein, that argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain, as well as to further the interests of...
: "Long after Kosiński was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his "remarkable body of work." Finkelstein wrote that Kosiński's book “depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic” even though they were fully aware of his Jewishness and “the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.”
The book's reception in Poland was far from uniform nevertheless. The Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw
University of Warsaw
The University of Warsaw is the largest university in Poland and one of the most prestigious, ranked as best Polish university in 2010 and 2011...
professor, Paweł Dudziak, noted that the Painted Bird is a great, if controversial piece. He stressed that since the book is surreal – a fictional tale – and does not present, or claim to present - real world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment are nothing but a misunderstanding of the book by those who take it too literally.
Authorship controversy
According to Eliot WeinbergerEliot Weinberger
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages...
, contemporary American
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
writer, essayist, editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
, and translator, Kosiński was not the author of the book. Weinberger alleged in his collection Karmic Traces that Kosiński had very little fluent knowledge of English at the time of its writing.
M.A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger's assertion by saying:
"Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right."
Claims of plagiarism
In June 1982, a Village Voice article accused Kosiński of plagiarismPlagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
, claiming much of his work was derivative of Polish sources unfamiliar to English readers. (Being There, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy - The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma
The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma
The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma is a 1932 Polish bestselling novel by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz.The book was made into a 1956 Polish film with Adolf Dymsza in the title role, then into a 1980 television miniseries starring Roman Wilhelmi and in 2002 into a comedy film starring Cezary...
, a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz). The article also claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been ghost-written by his "assistant editors," pointing to striking stylistic
Stylistics (linguistics)
Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
differences among Kosiński's novels. The New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey
George Reavey
George Reavey was a Russian-born Irish surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience...
, who in Kosiński's American biographer James Sloan
James Park Sloan
James Park Sloan is a noted American author, critic and academic. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
's opinion was embittered by his own lack of literary success, claimed to have written The Painted Bird. Reavey
George Reavey
George Reavey was a Russian-born Irish surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience...
's assertions were ignored by the press.
The Village Voice article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
– a view which was later supported by a Polish biographer, Joanna Siedlecka
Joanna Siedlecka
Joanna Siedlecka is a writer, reporter, member of the Polish Writers Association , and the author of 10 books, 4 collections of essays and 6 biographies....
, and Sloan. The article revealed that The Painted Bird, assumed by reviewers to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. The article maintained that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family and had never been appreciably mistreated.
Terence Blacker
Terence Blacker
Terence Blacker is an English author, columnist, journalist, and publisher. He is the son of General Sir Cecil Hugh Blacker, and the brother of sculptor Philip Blacker....
, an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
publisher of Kosiński's books and an author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in response to the article's accusations in 2002:
"The significant point about Jerzy Kosinski was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren BeattyWarren BeattyWarren Beatty born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has received a total of fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Director in 1982. He has also won four Golden Globe Awards including the Cecil B. DeMille Award.-Early life and...
's RedsRedsReds is a 1981 American epic film that was co-written, produced, directed by and starred Warren Beatty. It centers on the life and career of John Reed, the revolutionary communist, journalist, and writer who chronicled the Russian Revolution in his book Ten Days that Shook the World...
. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect."
D. G. Myers responded to Blacker's assertions in his review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan:
"This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. 'There was a hollow space at the center of Kosiński that had resulted from denying his past,' Sloan writes, 'and his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star.' On this theory, Kosiński emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against… all-out psychosis.
The journalist John Corry, being himself a controversial author,http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EFDE1430F933A05752C0A962958260, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in the New York Times in November 1982, defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the "Arts and Leisure" section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that "Kosiński was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation
Disinformation
Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth...
campaign."
The book was published and marketed as a fictional work although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Only later did it become clear to most reviewers that Kosiński was neither the boy in the story nor did he share any of the boy's experiences, as revealed in a series of articles in newspapers and books.(2) The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional. D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, reviewing a biography of Kosiński noted that initially the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin
Houghton Mifflin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an educational and trade publisher in the United States. Headquartered in Boston's Back Bay, it publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults.-History:The company was...
, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences." According to James Park Sloan, by the time the book was going into publication, Kosiński refrained from making further claims of the book being autobiographical – in a letter to de Santillana and in a subsequent author's note to the book itself. Kosinski nonetheless continued to assert that characterizing the novel as autobiographical "may be convenient for classification, but is not easily justified" (the same language he used in his author's note and his pre-publication correspondence with de Santillana) in later interviews during his life.
See also
- MarkowaMarkowaMarkowa is a village in Łańcut County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina called Gmina Markowa. It lies approximately south-east of Łańcut and east of the regional capital Rzeszów...
- Binjamin WilkomirskiBinjamin WilkomirskiBinjamin Wilkomirski was a name which Bruno Dössekker adopted in his constructed identity as a Holocaust survivor and published author...
- Anti-Polish sentiment