ГУЛаг Палестины

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 a

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 a

award given in France for the best foreign book of the year. Previous wi

Boll, Robert Pe

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