The Painted Bird is a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński that describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a "Gypsy or Jewish stray," wandering about small villages scattered around an unspecified country in Central or Eastern Europe (usually assumed to be Poland).
The story was originally described by Kosiński as autobiographical, but upon its publication by Houghton Mifflin he announced that it was a purely fictional account, although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II. The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional, having been the subject of a 1993 journalistic exposé (The Ugly Black Bird). The book was for many years regarded as an essential part of the literary Holocaust canon; since proven to be a work of fiction, it has lost much of its popularity.
The book describes the wandering boy's encounters with peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality, and rape, and in other forms of extreme violence and lust. The book's title was drawn from an incident in the story. The boy, while in the company of a professional bird catcher, observes how the man took one of his captured birds and painted it several colors. Then he released the bird to fly in search of a flock of its kin, but when the painted bird came upon the flock, they saw it as an intruder and viciously attacked the bird until it fell from the sky.
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Plot summary
In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, a six-year-old boy living in the largest city of an Eastern European country invaded by Nazi Germany is sent by his parents to hide in the countryside because of their past anti-Nazi activities. However, they lose contact with him because of the chaos of the war and he is left stranded. As a result of his black hair and olive skin he is constantly accused of being either a Jew or a Gypsy, although Kosiński's narrator denies this. He also has trouble understanding the local languages and dialects of the peasants he encounters. His first caretaker is a superstitious and unhygienic old woman named Marta, who refuses to allow him to look into her eyes because she is worried his "Gypsy eye" will curse her. Marta eventually becomes ill and dies, and the boy accidentally burns down her hut after spilling kerosene on it. Left to fend for himself, he wanders alone from village to village seeking shelter and food from adults in exchange for work. The boy endures various kinds of violence and cruelty, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for.
He is saved from an angry mob of villagers by Olga, an elderly folk healer, who takes him under her wing. Although she openly distrusts the boy because of his appearance, she gains his admiration for her cures. After he becomes infected with a local epidemic, she buries him up to his head in dirt and he is attacked by birds but recovers. However, he is caught by the villagers again and thrown onto a large catfish's air bladder, which floats him down the river away from the village.
He is then taken in by a miller and his wife, who frequently exposes herself to a young plowboy. After the miller beats his wife for her alleged infidelity one night, he invites the plowboy over for dinner and gouges out his eyes. The boy runs away again and seeks shelter with Lekh, a professional bird catcher in love with Stupid Ludmila, a promiscuous and scantily-clad woman who lives in the woods alone with a large dog after suffering a mental breakdown from a gang rape. After Stupid Ludmila does not return to Lekh for several days, he becomes enraged and starts killing random birds by painting them different colors and setting them loose to be killed by their own flocks. After Lekh leaves to search for her, Stupid Ludmila returns and attempts to molest the boy. They are found by the villagers and she is raped by all of the local men and beaten to death by their jealous wives. The boy leaves as Lekh inconsolably cradles her body.
Literary significance and criticism
Early reception
The initial reception of the book was generally positive. In his 1965 editorial review Elie Wiesel wrote that the book was "one of the best ... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity," a review written in The New York Times Book Review and quoted by the book's publisher. Richard Kluger, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine, wrote: "Extraordinary ... literally staggering ... one of the most powerful books I have ever read." And Jonathan Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives". Time magazine included the novel in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005", accentuating the atrocities witnessed by the protagonist.
In 2011, American critic Ruth Franklin observed that the book, previously a prominent fixture in Holocaust studies, particularly in the context of literature studies, has seen a significant decline within curricula of American high school and colleges, which she attributed to concerns surrounding the work's authenticity.
Anti-Polish sentiment and reception in Poland
The book's reception in Poland was far from uniform. Initially it was subject to much criticism from both the communist and émigré press due to its perceived anti-Polish sentiment, although there have been dissenting views. Since then the views about the book in Poland remain divided and the book is most often described as controversial. In the opinion of some critics, the book is a masterpiece and a parable of human fate, while in the opinion of others, it is an anti-Polish hoax.
The book has been particularly poorly received by people whom Kosinski knew in his childhood and whom he wrote into the novel. As noted by Kosiński's American biographer James Sloan, one of the villagers who helped Kosiński's family during the war, whom he interviewed, "wept and said, 'We saved their lives, and he turned us into monsters.'" He also recounted another incident, when Kosinski visited Poland: “The people who had saved his life came to his Polish book signing. He couldn’t acknowledge them. He had to protect his myth.”
Polish author and critic Stanisław Lem wrote a review of The Painted Bird, which he titled "The Career of a Counterfeit." He stated that "Sexual parasitism on the era of genocide is one of the greatest abominations imaginable." Lem further adds about Kosiński: "Since the realism of German genocidal practices does not suit the sexual sadist very well, as it is a kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and not an orgiastic panopticum, there comes to the rescue of authenticity the pseudologia pornographica." He also wrote that "This book, as a bestseller, received positive opinions from famous critics; what was abominable in it was interpreted as 'delirium' and 'phantasmagoria' of its child protagonist; the copulatory marathon of Polish peasants was seen as a dark reveal of the primitive wild 'Balkan' community; even some of our compatriots who realized that it was a lampoon [...] were ready to see a certain greatness in The Painted Bird, due to its boundless boldness and violence."
A number of non-Polish scholars and critics also commented on the anti-Polish sentiment present in the book. In 1996 D. G. Myers wrote that in the book, which he considers "an indispensable document of the Holocaust...although it may not be based on Kosinski’s own experiences," Kosinski "aims to exhibit the cruelty and backwardness of the Polish peasants." Writing in 1997 in The Polish Review, Thomas S. Gladsky described the book as an "attack on Poles." Norman Finkelstein wrote in The Holocaust Industry (2003) that Kosiński's book "depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic," even though they were fully aware of his Jewishness and "the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught." Kevin Hannan criticized the book in 2005, concluding that "The Painted Bird suggests a deceptive distortion of Polish history in the twentieth century, and the book demeans those Poles who risked their lives to save and shelter Jews such as Jerzy Kosinski." In 2022, the Polish critic and University of Rzeszów professor Elżbieta Rokosz in her chapter on controversies about Kosiński's book noted that "the novel was read as strongly anti-Polish."
Authorship controversy
According to Eliot Weinberger, contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator, Kosiński was not the author of the book. Weinberger alleged in his 2000 collection Karmic Traces that Kosiński had very little fluent knowledge of English at the time of its writing.
M. A. Orthofer commented on Weinberger's assertion:
Kosiński was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosiński.) Kosiński famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right.
Accusation of plagiarism
In June 1982, a Village Voice article claimed that Kosiński's books had actually been largely ghost-written by assistants, pointing to striking stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. The New York poet, publisher and translator George Reavey claimed to have written The Painted Bird. However, in the opinion of Sloan, Reavey was simply embittered by his own lack of literary success.
The journalist John Corry, also a controversial author, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in The New York Times defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the "Arts and Leisure" section in November 1982. Among other things, Corry alleged that "reports claiming that Kosiński was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign."
In 2012 Polish literary historian Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska from Lublin University wrote that The Painted Bird includes long excerpts lifted verbatim from a book published in the Second Polish Republic by the Polish-Jewish ethnographer Henryk Biegeleisen.
Controversy over supposed autobiographical elements
The Painted Bird was published and marketed as a fictional work although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II. Only later did it become clear to most reviewers that Kosiński was neither the boy in the story nor did he share any of the boy's experiences, as revealed in a series of articles in newspapers and books.(2) The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional.
D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, reviewing a biography of Kosiński noted that initially, the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry."
Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences." According to James Park Sloan, by the time the book was going into publication, Kosiński refrained from making further claims of the book being autobiographical – in a letter to de Santillana and in a subsequent author's note to the book itself. Kosiński nonetheless continued to assert that characterizing the novel as autobiographical "may be convenient for classification but is not easily justified" (the same language he used in his author's note and his pre-publication correspondence with de Santillana) in later interviews during his life.
The Village Voice article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust – a view which was later supported by Joanna Siedlecka, a Polish biographer, in her 1993 exposé The Ugly Black Bird and Sloan. They revealed that The Painted Bird, assumed by many reviewers to be semi-autobiographical, was a work of fiction. Rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński and his parents had spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family who sheltered them from the Germans and that he had never been mistreated in any way.
Reviewing James Park Sloan's biography of Kosiński for The New York Times Book Review, Louis Begley wrote: "Perhaps the most surprising element of this aspect of Kosiński's mystifications is that he obtained from his mother, who was still alive in Poland – the father had died by the time The Painted Bird was published – a letter corroborating the claim that he had been separated from his family during the war."
Film adaptation
The novel was adapted into a feature-length film in 2019, directed and produced by Václav Marhoul.
Music inspiration
The novel was the inspiration for Pearls Before Swine's "Morning Song" (1967), as well as for Siouxsie and the Banshees, who wrote a song called "Painted Bird" in 1982, on their album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. The novel also inspired an album of the same name by avant-garde composer John Zorn. It has also inspired the name of musician Daniel Kahn's band Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird.