The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Painted Bird
Book Review: A Frightening Reality
Summary: 5 Stars
This could be the most revealing book ever written about Occupied Poland. There are no visions of death camps, or trains of people being herded to there death. It is quite simply the true story of a young Jewish boy who must survive the paranoia and hatred that overtakes normally decent people in times of stress. If it is not the most important book written in the twentieth century, it is surely one of them. Each one of us is a painted bird.Book Review: A Good Story, No Doubt, and a Series of Polonophobic Tall Tales
Summary: 3 Stars
Although oversaturated with sex and violence, this Holocaust fiction is full of adventures, sensory expressiveness, victimhood, dealing with trustworthy and untrustworthy adults, the drama of hiding and escaping, etc.
The reader is led to believe such things as (review based on the 1965 edition): Jerzy Kosinski (Lewinkopf) living in an orphanage (p. 195), wandering from town to town, repeatedly beaten by adults with loss of teeth (13, 103, 200), pushed by boys into a mud puddle (p. 80), thrust into an ice hole while ice skating to be drowned (pp. 142-143), thrown by shepherds into a fire (p. 85), tied to a horse and dragged (p. 121), and losing his voice while being thrown into a manure pit (pp. 123-124). None of these things ever happened! Want to know what actually did? See the detailed English-language Peczkis review of Czarny ptasior (THE BLACK BIRD-MONSTROSITY).
Jews would rightfully be displeased if a popular fiction-masquerading-as-fact defamed them, especially if it was read in schools by impressionable children and teens. So why shouldn't Poles feel the same way? Note that anti-Polish fiction is still anti-Polish, just as anti-Semitic fiction (e. g., THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION) is still anti-Semitism. The popularity of the book makes it especially harmful. So is the fact that 99% of English-speaking readers know virtually nothing about the actual situation in German-occupied Poland.
Faithful Catholics are portrayed as ogres who would eagerly drown a child in excrement for accidentally dropping a missal. Misconceptions about indulgences are furthered, portrayed as they are as some sort of "Brownie points" with God, designed to bring fortune and avert misfortune. Negative Christian teachings about Jews are mentioned, but not the equally negative Judaic teachings about Christ and Christianity.
This work also aggravates blame-the-poor attitudes towards the peasantry. While peasants indeed were backward, this backwardness was primarily technological in nature. Most peasants were people of upright character, sophisticated in their own way. They owned no monopoly on prejudice, cruelty, or superstition. Unlike their detractors, they had to work very hard for a living.
However, this book also has indirect long-term value. It reminds us of the ingratitude of many Polish Jews (not only Kosinski!) to the Poles who saved them. It advertises how the press is willing to publicize anything dramatic about the Holocaust, without first checking out its authenticity (and thereby causing more eventual damage to Holocaust memory than the tiny band of Holocaust deniers ever could). Finally, it serves as a sobering wake-up call not to believe uncritically Jewish accounts of Polish atrocities (most recently compiled in Gross' FEAR). Bearing in mind that the vast majority of these accounts lack corroboration, one can only wonder how many of them are Kosinski-style fabrications that tell us more about Jewish prejudices against Poles than about real events.
THE PAINTED BIRD is best understood in the light of more recent works of the same genre. See the Peczkis review of Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography.
Book Review: A Hoax, but does that matter?
Summary: 1 Stars
From the "cut-rate Elie Wiesel", Kosinski's own description of himself. Does it matter that this is a hoax manufactured from whole cloth? Apparently not. Feeds existing prejudices and so is welcomed as a revelation. Here's to Mr. Holocaust, Jr., the Sr. title having been appropriated by that lachrymose pseudo-saint Mr. Weisel.
History is replete with examples of man's inhumanity to man. Claims of this book being "semi-autobiographical" have been shown to be entirely false. Kosinski is just another of the feeders-at-the-trough of the Holocaust Industry.
The truth is quite horrible enough. Why then the hoaxes like the book at hand and "Fragments"?
See The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New Edition for a critical and honest evaluation of the duplicity embodied by this and similar books seeking to exploit for personal financial and political advantage. Those who think this book is within the bounds of decency may wish to seek out that now out-of-print other hoax "Fragments".
Book Review: A Powerful Metaphor
Summary: 4 Stars
This 1976 version is an updated version of the 1965 original. It includes an enlighting Afterward by Kosinski.
In a series of harrowing misadventures the six-year-old protagonist of this shocking story of survival in WWII Poland endures on wits and luck alone. The scenes are lamentable as indeed they must be to illustrate the horrors associated with war. This story is not meant for the timid as it contains rape, incest, beastiality, and cruelty. The unnamed boy of this account is like the painted bird of Polish folklore and his experiences have so changed him that he is initially reluctant to be reunited with his father and mother at the end of the war.
Book Review: A Rural Portrait of the Holocaust
Summary: 4 Stars
In The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski tells of the wanderings of a young boy during World War II. The boy, six years old, becomes the object of brutality and prejudice, all of which stems from a combination of peasant superstition and Nazi hatred. The peasants have no limit to their heartlessness: they beat the boy, molest him, and they nearly succeed in killing him-all for the color of his skin (just like Lekh's painted bird). In their minds the boy is nothing more than an ethnic curse to their village, one who could potentially incite the Germans to slaughter everyone within earshot. Just when the boy senses that the peasants will destroy him, he flees to the next village, and the whole process starts anew. In his wanderings he learns judgment and the ability to discern crescendos of violence. The book is replete with gruesome images: bunkers filled with hungry rats that devour a living body with the efficiency of a school of piranhas; broken Jewish bodies moaning beside the train tracks; a dead woman melting under the heat of her burning shack. Death. The book is replete with it. In the midst of such desolation, the boy longs for stability and friendship and the confidence of trust. But he is disillusioned and betrayed each step of his journey, and the lessons of evil change him in ways he does not know.
The Painted Bird has torn me away from my cozy world and has shown me another sphere where people treat human life as though it is not human. The book is certainly gripping and a little disturbing; it has left in me an uncomfortable feeling that I cannot shake. I guess one hallmark of the successful book is its ability to do this.