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      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. 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
      would grant her his only TV interview, for Italian TV, undertaken within two years of the Village Voice episode - but his physical
      assault ended their relationship as lovers.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 391)
      Second character-revealing incident - how Kosinski had fun behind the wheel.
      On the long straightaway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, he opened it up to 120, pure exhilaration for a boy who had been told
      always to do things carefully, legally, and correctly. A little farther along they found themselves stuck on a two-lane road behind a
      slow driver. As a man who would one day drive Formula One race cars, David was astonished at the fluidity and skill with which
      Kosinski finally got around the recalcitrant ahead of him - and entertained mightily when Kosinski then slowed to a crawl and
      used those skills to prevent the car from passing him. He was more than a little shocked, however, when Kosinski persisted with
      the game in the face of an oncoming truck, causing the other car to run off into a ditch.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 150-151)
      Third character-revealing incident - how Kosinski played a little joke on one of his students.
      Kosinski looked at the young man severely. "You know, the very first time I saw you I got the feeling you were going to die
      young," he said. "In the past twenty years I've had the same feeling about several people and each time I've had it, they died. Of
      course, I could be wrong this time."
      The young man, who was afraid of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, started to cry.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 287)
      Fourth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski exposed Yale students to the intellectual contributions
      of the Neo Charles Mansonists.
      As part of the class, the Yale undergraduates were required to write about their own deaths. To stimulate their thinking, Kosinski
      brought in members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement - a group of Satanists who arrived dressed in gray. They
      saw themselves as having some sort of tenuous link with Charles Manson's Helter-Skelter family. Proselytizing in Kosinski's Yale
      classroom, they urged the students to "accept and embrace evil within themselves." This notion was uncomfortably close to
      Kosinski's own claim to Krystyna Iwaszkiewicz that he could achieve revenge upon his enemies because of a pact with the Devil
      [...]. The classroom episode took an unexpected turn when a young Jewish student went off with the Satanists, prompting an
      exchange with the student's parents over the pedagogical appropriateness of this classroom activity.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 300-301)
      Fifth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski entertained his dining partners.
      One day, when the three couples had planned to have dinner in the city, Rose Styron arrived first and was persuaded to be his
      accomplice in a prank. Kosinski would hide in his apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, and the others would look for him. They
      came, looked, failed to find, and began to grow cross; Sadri was ready for dinner, and didn't find the prank so funny. Kosinski
      finally unfolded himself from behind the cabinets in his darkroom.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 262)
      Sixth character-revealing incident - what Kosinski did to Marian Javits's dog - from which some might
      conclude that Jerzy Kosinski was not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your
      daughter, and not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your son - he was the kind of
      man that you would not leave alone with your dog.
      Marian Javits, in particular, was charmed by him, and she continued to be his friend even after his stories and eccentricities had
      become familiar - this despite the fact that one of his eccentricities had to do with her dog. Lying in bed recovering from a leg
      injury received while riding, she was startled when her dog ran furiously across the room, dripping urine. A moment later Kosinski
      appeared at the door. Later a friend told her that Kosinski had been observed abusing the dog in a way that would engender such
      behavior.
      (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263)
      HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98
      T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility
      The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several
      million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The Guardian
      reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to London was
      paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's dramatic
      moments were faked.
      The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post
      article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the
      relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs:
      Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug
      smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who
      cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities
      which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their
      crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident
      principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC
      television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity
      of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing
      Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news
      sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same
      as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity
      that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making
      public confession of their crimes.
      Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes
      broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable
      incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their
      crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed
      to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies
      lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do
      not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom.
      The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of
      such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different.
      In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a
      fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the
      ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and
      that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly