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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. Sweden, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have
escaped there. Maybe they had gotten there by boat.
The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In
the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the
Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother
spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war,
Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears
she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed.
How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family
had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin,
but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans
could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better.
What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of
each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether
visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of
objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or
in life, was whatever worked best.
Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She
had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may
have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories
had become an important part of his personal capital.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172)
And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting
her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son,
Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German
translation of The Painted Bird:
But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she
spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis,
but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable
statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink.
As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to
maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225)
In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his
mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological:
There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made
clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To
a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before
Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure."
Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father
suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the
father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship
bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with
transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130)
Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail.
Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date
with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his
step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV
documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski):
Toward the end of the meal he suggested that the two of them go to Chateau Nineteen, an S-M parlor with which he seemed to be
quite familiar. She agreed on condition that she not be required to participate or remove her clothes. Once they were there, he
moved comfortably among the patrons, chatting as if at a country-club tea. He was particularly friendly with a man who worked in
the jewelry district, who was busy masturbating as they spoke.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 360-361)
An accumulation of incidents points to the conclusion that Jerzy Kosinski was
irresponsible, immature, impulsive, physically abusive toward women, and
generally reckless with the welfare of others. Below are six character-revealing
incidents which taken collectively might have long ago led Jews to write Jerzy
Kosinski off as unfit for leadership, might have long ago led Jews to conclude
that he was too unstable to be trusted as a Holocaust witness, might have long
ago led Jews to conclude that he should be shunned as someone likely to bring
ruin upon any who associated with him:
First character-revealing incident - how Kosinski attempted to elicit a declaration of love.
Meanwhile, matters had come to a crisis in the affair with Dora Militaru. He insisted that she profess her love for him, and when
she refused, he hit her repeatedly. Dora broke off the affair. Their relationship soon resumed as a friendship - in January he
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