<Archive Obituaries> Jerzy Kosinski (May 3rd 1991)
Bill Schenley
Photo: http://wiredforbooks.org/images/JerzyKosinski2.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (May 3rd 1991) ~
By Mervyn Rothstein
Jerzy Kosinski was a maverick, an eccentric, a celebrity who
was an intimate of many other celebrities, a Polish-born
novelist who immigrated to the United States at age 24 and
achieved perhaps his greatest success with his first novel.
That work was "The Painted Bird." Published in 1965, when he
was 32 years old, it graphically and movingly depicted the
dreadful journey of a young Eastern European boy who is sent
to the distant countryside by his parents to escape the
Nazis at the start of World War II. It has been called a
classic of Holocaust fiction.
The boy, called only the Gypsy, is abandoned and left to
wander through a nightmare world where he is beaten,
starved, demeaned, tortured and brutalized by the vicious
and ignorant peasants he encounters.
The boy, the author said, was Kosinski himself, and the
novel was the fictionalized version of the horrors he
encountered. "Every incident is true," he once contended.
Mr. Kosinski's personality was complex, shaped largely by
his terrible childhood, by his legacy as a Holocaust
survivor and by his life after the war under Communist
suppression in Poland. He was once described as a "displaced
person in an uncharted landscape," a phrase he himself used
to describe the main character of his novel "Passion Play."
Disguises and False Identities
He was well known for his vivacity, but he was equally well
known for his eccentric behavior, about which he often
boasted. He created for himself many disguises and false
identities, the product of a paranoia that he openly
discussed.
"I have hiding places everywhere," he once said. "If I were
alone in your apartment for half an hour, I'd find a hiding
place there."
Critics have noted that all his protagonists were in one way
or another like himself and that much of his work was
autobiographical. His second novel, "Steps" (1968), a tale
of violence and repression in his native Poland and the pain
of adjustment to the technological society of the United
States, won the National Book Award. Hugh Kenner, writing in
The New York Times Book Review, said that "Celine and Kafka
stand behind this accomplished art."
After "Steps," Mr. Kosinski achieved only limited critical
success as a novelist, but he had already attained a certain
celebrity and clung to it. Once describing himself as a
"first-class second-rate novelist," he was a constant
presence at literary parties and social gatherings in New
York, and he became a colleague of the rich and the famous,
numbering among his friends Warren Beatty, Zbigniew
Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.
Help for Imprisoned Writers
Mr. Kosinski, however, used his status for purposes other
than self-publicity. He was elected president of the
American Center of PEN, the international writers group, in
1973, and served two terms, until 1975. Working through PEN
and the International League of Human Rights, he often
worked for the release of imprisoned writers. He also
defended humanitarian causes through the American Civil
Liberties Union.
Jerzy Nikodem Kosinski was born on June 14, 1933, in Lodz,
Poland, the only child of well-off Jewish parents.
When the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, the 6-year-old Jerzy
was sent by his parents to the remote countryside where, he
later said, he began the brutal adventures that were
mirrored in "The Painted Bird."
Mr. Kosinski received master's degrees in sociology and
history at the University of Lodz in the mid-50's and became
an assistant professor of sociology at the Polish Academy of
Sciences in Warsaw.
For a long time, he and his parents -- with whom he had been
reunited -- wanted to leave Poland legally, as immigrants to
Israel, but they failed in their attempt. So, Mr. Kosinski
often said, he sent bogus letters to various authorities
urging that they sponsor him for a research project in the
United States.
Parents Remain in Poland
Finally, in 1957, he succeeded, but his parents remained
behind.
In 1958, he received a grant to study sociology at Columbia
University, where he was a postgraduate student until 1965.
His first two books, collections of essays that dealt with
political behavior, were "The Future Is Ours, Comrade"
(1960) and "No Third Path" (1962). They were published under
the pseudonym Joseph Novak.
With the publication of "The Painted Bird," attacks on Mr.
Kosinski began and continued in later years. Its depictions
of brutality were described as slanderous in his native
Poland. In 1982, a front-page article in The Village Voice
tried to discredit Mr. Kosinski's writings. The authors of
the article said that he had hired editors who virtually
wrote his novels for him and that the Central Intelligence
Agency "apparently played a clandestine role" in the
publication of his first two books.
Mr. Kosinski and many others vigorously denounced the
reports as unfounded, and they were never proved.
Many critics said that after Mr. Kosinski's early successes,
the quality of his writing diminished steadily. His novels
of the 1970's and 1980's were generally not well received.
Some critics also deplored the way he treated women in his
novels, saying that it was violent and degrading. But Mr.
Kosinski vehemently denied the charge. "It is simply not
true that women in my novels are victimized," he once said.
"There is no gratuitous sex or violence."
On the Screen in 'Reds'
His 1971 novel "Being There" was made into a film in 1979.
Mr. Kosinski himself also appeared in a movie, as the
Bolshevik villain Grigory Zinoviev in "Reds" in 1981.
His novels also include "The Devil Tree" (1973), "Cockpit"
(1975), "Blind Date" (1977), "Passion Play" (1979),
"Pinball" (1982) and "The Hermit of 69th Street" (1988). In
1970, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters
award for literature.
Mr. Kosinski was a Guggenheim Fellow at Wesleyan University
and later taught American prose at Princeton and Yale. At
his death, he was a fellow of Timothy Dwight College of
Yale, chairman of the Polish-American Resources Corporation
in New York and president of the Jewish Presence Foundation,
which he started in 1988. He was also a co-founder of the
American Bank in Poland.
Mr. Kosinski and his first wife, Mary Weir, were divorced in
1966. She died in 1968. In addition to his current wife,
Katherina von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, who is known to her
friends as Kiki, Mr. Kosinski is survived by a stepbrother,
Dr. Henry Kosinski, of Lodz, Poland.
Ms. Fraunhofer-Kosinski said yesterday that at her husband's
request no funeral service would be held.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Jerzy Kosinski, right, with Tom Wolfe and
Joan Didion at a PEN Celebration in Manhattan in 1985. (Jack
Kaminsky)
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Photo: http://home.iae.nl/users/scehv/el/kosinski.jpg
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Novelist Jerzy Kosinski, 57, Kills Himself In N.Y. Home;
Literature: Works By The Polish Native Include 'The Painted Bird'
And 'Being There.' He Had Been Ill.
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (May 4th 1991) ~
By David Treadwell, Staff Writer
Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish-born novelist and World War II
Holocaust survivor who won acclaim with such best-sellers as
"The Painted Bird" and "Being There," killed himself Friday
morning, apparently despondent over failing health.
His body was discovered by his wife, Katherina von
Fraunhofer-Kosinski, at about 9:30 a.m. in the bathroom of
their mid-town Manhattan apartment, police said. Kosinski,
who was 57, was found naked in a tub half full of water with
a plastic bag tied over his head.
A suicide note was left in the office of his apartment,
located in a swank section of West 57th Street near Carnegie
Hall, but authorities refused to divulge the contents.
In a statement issued through a publicist, the writer's
widow said that he had been in deteriorating health as the
result of a serious heart condition.
"He had become depressed by his growing inability to work,
and by his fear of being a burden to me and his friends,"
she added.
She told police that she had last seen him alive at 9 p.m.
Thursday, authorities said, adding that the couple slept in
separate bedrooms.
Author Gay Talese said that Kosinski had been at a party at
his house until late Thursday night and appeared to be "as
cheerful and smart as ever."
Talese said that Kosinski's suicide was ironic considering
the horror of his early childhood after the Nazi occupation
of Poland. "He took it all and he didn't seem -- I emphasize
seem -- to be undermined," Talese said.
Born in Lodz in 1933, Kosinski was 6 years old and the only
child of cultured, well-to-do Jewish parents when the Nazis
overran Poland in 1939. His father was a distinguished
classics professor at Lodz University and his mother was a
pianist who had trained at the Moscow Conservatory.
Kosinski's parents sent him away into the remote countryside
in a desperate effort to save his life. But he was abandoned
by the friend to whom his parents had entrusted him and,
like many other children who were similarly abandoned during
that period, became a wanderer. He led a nightmare
existence, forced to beg for food and shelter among often
unsympathetic and brutal peasants in rural Eastern Europe.
He arrived in the United States in 1957 as a penniless
immigrant who, as he recounted in a newspaper interview in
1979, borrowed money to make a living as a trucker. To repay
the loan, he said, he moonlighted as a parking lot
attendant, movie theater projectionist and chauffeur for a
black nightclub owner in Harlem.
He taught himself English by a variety of methods, including
memorizing Shakespeare, going to the same movies repeatedly,
and calling up telephone operators late at night for help in
grammar. After two years in the United States, he launched
his literary career with the first of his two nonfiction
books, "The Future Is Ours, Comrade," which he published
under the pen name of Joseph Novak.
In 1965, the same year in which he became a naturalized U.S.
citizen, he published the highly acclaimed novel "The
Painted Bird," which was based on his experiences as a child
during World War II and is considered a classic of Holocaust
literature. It won the best foreign book award in France
that year.
Critics praised the book for treating horror with such
controlled language. "The surrealistic quality . . . is a
blow on the mind. . . . You have made the normality of it
all (the Nazi experience) apparent," playwright Arthur
Miller wrote to Kosinski.
A later novel, "Being There," was published in 1971 and was
made into a Hollywood movie starring Peter Sellers, Shirley
MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas. A bitingly satirical comedy,
the 1980 film features Sellers as a simple-minded gardener
who knows only what he has seen on television but manages to
reach great political heights in Washington.
Kosinski's other books include "The Devil Tree," "Cockpit,"
"Blind Date," "Passion Play," "Pinball" and "The Hermit of
69th Street." Another work, "Steps," won a highly coveted
National Book Award in 1969.
Kosinski's literary career was tarnished in 1982 after the
Village Voice, a weekly newspaper of New York's cultural
avant-garde, charged that parts of his books were actually
written by assistants.
The article, titled "Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words" -- a
play on "The Painted Birds" -- ignited a literary furor
which saw the New York Times mount a spirited defense on
Kosinski's behalf.
Besides raising questions about the way Kosinski wrote his
novels, the Village Voice also contended that the writer had
given different stories about his life and how he had
entered the United States.
As evidence, the Village Voice article cited a New York
Times Sunday Magazine profile appearing in February, 1982,
in which Kosinski is described as being flung into a pond of
human offal for punishment by sadistic peasants during his
World War II ordeals and was so traumatized that he was
struck mute.
But in a later interview in Penthouse magazine, the Village
Voice writers said, Kosinski is quoted as saying that he
lost his speech while serving as an altar boy during a Mass
and fell with the Bible when he was supposed to transfer the
book from one side of the altar to another.
"In fact, there is no discrepancy in the two accounts," New
York Times writer John Corry wrote in a 6,444-word article
defending Kosinski. "In 'The Painted Bird,' the boy is
impressed into serving in the Mass. He drops the Bible. The
outraged peasants then fling him into a pit of human ordure.
It is a memorable section of the novel."
Corry said that the Village Voice's controversial claims
were part of a campaign extending over almost two decades to
discredit Kosinski through lies, innuendoes and half-truths,
many of them spread by agents of the Communist Party
hierarchy in Poland, which had always reviled the author for
his "anti-Polish" writings.
Corry's article in the New York Times became the source of
further contention after critics charged that two of the
paper's top editors, both friends of Kosinski's, had
encouraged the writing of the piece and were intimately
involved in its preparation.
Kosinski vehemently denied the charges in the Village Voice
article.
In 1988, after the liberalization in Poland, Kosinski
returned to the country he had fled 31 years before to a
triumphal welcome. Crowds packed the auditoriums where he
appeared. He cut a slim, elegant figure and, speaking in
flawless Polish, "his outrageous statements, rich wordplay
and puns quickly won over his audiences," according to an
Associated Press report from Warsaw.
"The Painted Bird," which had long been banned in Poland,
was published there the following year. Thousands of book
lovers and admirers besieged the Warasw bookshop where the
novel went on sale. Kosinski himself was on hand to
autograph the first copies.
Kosinski earned a master's degree in political science from
the University of Lodz in 1953 and a master's degree in
history two years later. He was a post-graduate student at
New York's Columbia University for eight years until 1965,
earning a doctorate in Hebrew letters.
Between 1969 and 1973, he served successively as a visiting
lecturer in English at Princeton, a visiting professor in
English prose at Yale and a resident fellow at Davenport
College.
In 1981, he appeared in the Warren Beatty movie "Reds" as a
Bolshevik hatchet man.
He also served two consecutive terms as president of the
American Center of PEN, the international association of
authors.
"We shall mourn him," said Karen Kennerly, executive
director of the PEN American Center. "His work evoked a
deeply imaginative and powerful response to the terrors of
the world. He will be remembered as one of the few writers
in English who contended with the unspeakable."
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said, in a
statement released through a spokeswoman, that Kosinski was
"a provocative writer and a stimulating friend."
Of death, Kosinski once wrote: "You don't die in the United
States, you underachieve. . . . Dying is merely a stage of
being alive, slightly below the top."
His suicide in a bathtub of water struck a grimly ironic
note. In an article he wrote for Time magazine in 1984, he
said that he had feared water ever since he was 10 years old
and was pushed under the ice while ice-skating on a lake in
Poland as a prank by village kids.
"Ever since -- whether in an ocean, river, lake, swimming
pool or, occasionally, even in a bathtub -- I've been
terrified of water closing over me again," he wrote.
Kosinski had no children.
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Photo: http://www.ukar.org/kosins02.jpg
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FROM: The Independent (May 6th 1991) ~
By Andrew Rosenheim
Jerzy Nikodem Kosinski, writer, born Lodz Poland 14 June
1933, books include The Future is Ours, Comrade:
conversations with the Russians (as Joseph Novak) 1960, No
Third Path (as Joseph Novak) 1962, The Painted Bird 1965,
Steps 1968, Being There 1971, The Devil Tree 1973, Cockpit
1975, Blind Date 1977, Passion Play 1979, The Hermit of 69th
Street 1988, married 1962 Mary Weir (died 1968; marriage
dissolved 1966), 1987 Katherina von Fraunhoer, died New York
City 3 May 1991.
Jerzy Kosinski was a latter- day Scott Fitzgerald, with less
talent but more excuse for squandering it.
Born a Jew in Lodz, Poland, in 1933, he somehow survived the
war years; his experiences in hiding - although doubtless
inflated and dramatised - were at the horrific core of his
first and best novel, The Painted Bird. Famous after its
publication, Kosinski was not one to downplay the mystique
that surrounded his boyhood years as a fugitive sent for
safety by his parents to the Polish countryside. He was a
glamorous figure; at the heart of Kosinski's appeal was the
clear but unarticulated sense that he had survived the
putatively unsurvivable. Sadly, his suicide, like that of
Primo Levi, indicates he had not.
After the war, and a reunion with the few survivors of his
family, Kosinski seemed to re-assimilate into Polish life.
Returning to his native Lodz, he entered the university
there and took an MA in political science and another in
history. Polished, articulate, a skilful dissembler, he
played the Stalinist system well and soon became an
instructor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Underneath, he was deeply discontented and desperate to get
out of Poland. After countless attempts, he contrived to
reach America in 1957 and was offered a place at Columbia
University in New York.
He received his PhD from Columbia in the same year (1965) as
the publication of The Painted Bird, having already written
two works of non-fiction (anti-Communist tracts) under the
pen- name Joseph Novak. Unlike these two books, however, The
Painted Bird is a novel of raw experience, told through the
eyes of a small boy. The innocence of this perspective
renders the rapes and murders it recounts the more
shocking - especially to American readers who were
accustomed to having wartime atrocities presented in
suitably Hollywood-derived dramatic tones. Appropriately,
the war's end finds the protagonist literally unable to
speak, a muteness Kosinski claimed to have suffered himself
for five years. Noted for its lucidity, the novel's prose is
straightforward, almost spare; widely praised, it was later
to be the subject of controversy. At the time, its lack of
emotionalism made its account of brutalising events cruelly
cold.
Steps (1968), Kosinski's next book and a winner of the
National Book Award, retains the clipped, distant narration
of the first novel, but here the subject matter is more
fragmentary and less compelling, despite its efforts to link
his wartime experiences with his adjustment to peacetime
America. An episodic novel, it enjoyed its success in the
heyday of narrative experiment, when the unreadable salvos
of Donald Barthelme were first beginning to appear in The
New Yorker. The episodes, some violent, most strange, are
only tenuously connected by an italicised dialogue between
lovers; the running theme of love's fragility is too well
hidden beneath the brittle veneer of narrative
disembodiment. Read today, Steps seems thin and dated,
having lost its studious artistic trendiness.
In Being There (1971), Kosinski's by-now characteristic
narrative distance found a fitting representative in the
book's hero, Chance the gardener. More idiot than savant,
Chance is isolated from direct contact with the world,
knowing it only through television. His conversation
consists of dutiful repetition of other people's talk, like
a caricature of a Rogerian therapist; not surprisingly, his
remarks emerge to the enthralment of his listeners.
Set entirely in the United States, Being There is a gentle
satire that mocks the rampant media fascination of
Americans; Chance's freak rise to political prominence
suggests how thoroughly the mode of message ousts the
message's meaning. To suggest that Kosinski's satiric thrust
here was either novel or deep is to credit the book with a
heavyweight aspect it simply does not contain. It is also to
ignore the novel's considerable charm. Odd and goofy, the
book would have seemed an unlikely candidate for filming,
but it was made in 1979 into a film, starring Peter Sellers
and Shirley MacLaine, which won Kosinski awards (including a
Bafta award, 1980) for his screenplay and an Oscar for
Melvyn Douglas, as best supporting actor.
The success of these early novels made Kosinski a celebrity.
If he was ambivalent about his own publicity, he nonetheless
helped increase it with a teasing mix of embellishment and
reserve about his past. He enjoyed New York society, yet he
retained his academic connections and taught as a visiting
fellow at a number of universities, including Princeton and
Yale. Like many good teachers, he was a riveting performer,
amusing, alert, full of stories: like bad ones, he took
little interest in his students. Among both students and the
public at large, he was an object of fascination rather than
of affection, and he had many detractors - although
revealingly, most of them were people who did not know him
well. His fierce anti- Communism, made more credible under
Fascism too, did not win him friends among New York's
liberal intelligentsia, nor did his obvious liking for the
High Life. He could claim that he was merely an observer of
the absurdities of moneyed Manhattan, but his appearance on
the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in polo gear
suggested he was more involved in the world of Ralph Lauren
chi-chi than he recognised.
After Being There none of Kosinski's novels did as well.
Most also involved a protagonist who isolates himself from
human relations, but set in the modern-day prosperity of the
West this distancing seems perverse, unconvincing. As social
satires, Kosinski's later novels read flatly, perhaps
because his avowed detachment masked a growing and
unattractive interest in the very rich. His own
disappointment as his novels of the Seventies were badly
received was compounded in 1982 when The Village Voice
published a detailed expose accusing him of relying
inordinately on English-language assistants for the creation
of his early novels. Under fire from Kosinski's defenders
(who included a former editor of the Voice), the paper
failed to produce the promised documentation of its charges.
Gradually the scandal died.
Yet some mud stuck, enough at any rate to spur Kosinski to
write a novel about a writer accused of just such excessive
''borrowing''. The Hermit of 69th Street appeared in 1988
and uses the historical example of James Fenimore Cooper
(who was himself accused of plagiarism) as a metaphor for
Kosinski's own persecution. Unfortunately the novel gets
lost in a welter of paranoiac investigation, an unreadable
mass of footnotes, and as a defence flounders for the simple
reason that it is so largely unreadable.
With his fame as a novelist eroding (partly replaced by the
residual notoriety of the Voice's smear), Kosinski immersed
himself increasingly in politics, becoming president of
American PEN, active in the American Civil Liberties Union,
travelling frequently to Israel and Poland. Typically, he
stood out even in the supposedly anonymous environs of
philanthropic concerns, intensely irritating many Israelis
by his contention that Jews should stop talking about the
Holocaust and concentrate on current goals and achievements.
On all public fronts, Kosinski always quite fearlessly spoke
his mind.
But, never, really about himself. Close friends could detect
an underlying depression beneath the forceful gaiety of the
public persona. Worried by a heart condition, he grew
increasingly hypochondriacal and ever more prone to the
paranoia that had afflicted him, quite understandably, since
the war. To some of his friends he seemed a writer trying
desperately to draw upon past powers, a man who may well
have recognised that he could not recover his former
success. A more likely explanation for his death is that he
simply joined the unutterably sad list of other Holocaust
victims who, doomed at a young age, somehow manage to
survive their wartime horrors only to discover that they
have not truly escaped at all.
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Book covers:
("The Painted Bird")
http://www.globecorner.com/i/t/paintbir.GIF
("Being There")
http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/being_there.jpg
("Passion Play")
http://www.fatcatbooks.com/fcb455/images/items/183.jpg
("Kor Randevu")
http://dukkan.dharma.com.tr/img/books/k/975390180-1.jpg
("Steps")
http://www.betweenthecovers.com/images/58625.jpg
robertc...@yahoo.com
Bill Schenley wrote:
> In Novels And Life, A Maverick And An Eccentric
>
> Photo: http://wiredforbooks.org/images/JerzyKosinski2.jpg
>
> FROM: The New York Times (May 3rd 1991) ~
> By Mervyn Rothstein
>
I have read that Kosinski was due to fly out to Los Angeles where he
intended to stay at the house of his friend Roman Polanski and
Polanski's actrees-wife Sharon Tate. He could not make it,
however--luckily for him. That was the very night on which Manson's
followers broke into the Polanski house and murdered Sharon and a group
of her friends. Kosinski lived to type another day.
Mark Seinfels, in his book _Final Drafts_, says that Kosinski's stories
about his terrible childhood were untrue. He did not separate from his
parents, and he did not live as a "gypsy" in the countryside. Don't
know whether Seinfels has his facts straight. I'm always suspicious of
debunkers--especially when, as in this case--the stories did no harm.
Bob Champ