Jerzy Kosiński

Jerzy Kosiński studied at Columbia University. The recorded working language is English and Polish. The field of work recorded is literature. Employment is recorded with Wesleyan University. Works named in the authority record are The Painted Bird, Cockpit and Being There. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Writers Guild of America Award, National Book Award and National Book Award for Fiction.

• Name — Jerzy Kosiński • Birth Name — Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf • Born — 14 June 1933 • Birthplace — Łódź, Poland • Died — 3 May 1991 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Education — University of Łódź • Occupation — Novelist

Kosiński was born in 1933 as Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf in Łódź, as the only child of Polish Jews Mieczysław (Mojżesz) Lewinkopf and Elżbieta Liniecka. As a child during World War II, he lived in occupied central Poland under a false identity, Jerzy Kosiński, which his father gave him. Eugeniusz Okoń, a Catholic priest, issued him a forged baptismal certificate, and the Lewinkopf family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who offered assistance to Polish Jews, at grave personal risk. Kosiński's father was assisted not only by town leaders and clergymen, but by individuals such as Marianna Pasiowa, a member of an underground network that helped Jews evade capture. The family lived openly in Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, near Stalowa Wola, and attended church in nearby Wola Rzeczycka, with the support of villagers in Kępa Rzeczycka. For a time, they were sheltered by a Catholic family in Rzeczyca Okrągła. Jerzy even served as an altar boy in the local church. After the war, Kosiński's father aligned himself with Poland's communist regime, and the family was relatively well off. Kosiński and his parents moved to Jelenia Góra. By age 22 he had earned degrees in history and sociology at the University of Łódź. He then became a teaching assistant at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Kosiński also studied in the Soviet Union, and served as a sharpshooter in the Polish Army. A biographer writes that Kosinski disliked conformity and therefore the communism that his father had sworn allegiance to, and because of this developed anti-communist views. In order to emigrate to the United States in 1957, he created a fake foundation which ostensibly sponsored him, and forged letters from prominent communist authorities guaranteeing his return to Poland, which were then required for anyone leaving the country. Kosiński first worked at odd jobs to get by, including driving a truck, and he managed to graduate from Columbia University. In 1965 he became an American citizen. In 1967 he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and in 1968 a grant from the Ford Foundation. In 1970 he won an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature. The grants allowed him to write a political nonfiction book that opened new doors of opportunity. He became a lecturer at Yale, Princeton, Davenport, and Wesleyan Universities. Kosiński practiced photographic art, with a 1957 one-man exhibition at Warsaw's Crooked Circle [Krzywe Koło] Gallery and a 1988 exhibition at New York's Andre Zarre Gallery. In 1962 Kosiński married an American steel heiress, Mary Hayward Weir, eighteen years his senior; four years later they divorced. Weir died in 1968 from brain cancer, leaving Kosiński out of her will. He fictionalized the marriage in his novel Blind Date, describing Weir under the name Mary-Jane Kirkland. In 1968 he married Katherina "Kiki" von Fraunhofer (1933–2007), a marketing consultant and descendant of Bavarian nobility.

Toward the end of his life Kosiński suffered from multiple illnesses, and questions arose regarding plagiarism in his work. By his late 50s he was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. He died by suicide on May 3, 1991, by ingesting a lethal amount of alcohol and drugs and wrapping a plastic bag around his head, suffocating himself. His suicide note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity." Per his wishes, Kosiński was cremated and Oscar de la Renta spread his ashes near his home in the Dominican Republic, off a small cove in Casa de Campo.

Kosiński's novels have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, and have been translated into over 30 languages, with total sales estimated at 70 million in 1991.

The Painted Bird, Kosiński's controversial 1965 novel, is a fictional account that depicts the personal experiences of a boy of unknown religious and ethnic background who wanders around unidentified areas of Eastern Europe during World War II and takes refuge among a series of people, many of whom are brutally cruel and abusive, either to him or to others. Soon after the book was published in the US, Kosiński was accused by the then-Communist Polish government of being anti-Polish, especially following the regime's 1968 anti-Zionist campaign. The book was banned in Poland from its initial publication until the fall of the Communist government in 1989. When it was finally printed, thousands of Poles in Warsaw lined up for as long as eight hours to purchase copies of the work autographed by Kosiński. Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw professor Paweł Dudziak remarked that "in spite of the unclear role of its author, The Painted Bird is an achievement in English literature." He stressed that, because the book is a work of fiction and does not document real-world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment may result only from taking it too literally. The book received recommendations from Elie Wiesel who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was "one of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." Richard Kluger, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering... one of the most powerful books I have ever read." 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."

Steps (1968), a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. American novelist David Foster Wallace described Steps as a "collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that's like nothing else anywhere ever". Wallace continued in praise: "Only Kafka's fragments get anywhere close to where Kosiński goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined." Samuel Coale, in a 1974 discussion of Kosiński's fiction, wrote that "the narrator of Steps for instance, seems to be nothing more than a disembodied voice howling in some surrealistic wilderness."

• Illustration — Jerzy Kosiński (1973) One of Kosiński's more significant works is Being There (1971), a satirical view of the absurd reality of America's media culture. It is the story of Chance the gardener, a man with few distinctive qualities who emerges from nowhere and suddenly becomes the heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon and a presidential policy adviser. His simple and straightforward responses to popular concerns are praised as visionary despite the fact that no one actually understands what he is really saying. Many questions surround his mysterious origins, and filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible. The novel was made into a 1979 movie directed by Hal Ashby, and starring Peter Sellers, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, and Melvyn Douglas, who won the award for Best Supporting Actor. The screenplay was co-written by award-winning screenwriter Robert C. Jones and Kosiński. The film won the 1981 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Film) Best Screenplay Award, as well as the 1980 Writers Guild of America Award (Screen) for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium. It was nominated for the 1980 Golden Globe Best Screenplay Award (Motion Picture).

In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith alleged Kosiński wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report said that Kosiński's books had been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. Kosiński, according to them, had depended upon his freelance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing." American biographer James Sloan notes that New York poet, publisher and translator George Reavey said he had written The Painted Bird for Kosiński. The article found a more realistic picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust – a view which was supported by biographers Joanna Siedlecka and Sloan. The article asserted that The Painted Bird, assumed to be semi-autobiographical, was largely a work of fiction. The information showed that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, as his fictional character did, Kosiński spent the war years in hiding with Polish Catholics. Journalist John Corry wrote a 6,000-word feature article in The New York Times in November 1982, responding and defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports that "Kosinski was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign." In 1988, Kosiński wrote The Hermit of 69th Street, in which he sought to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book. "Ironically," wrote theatre critic Lucy Komisar, "possibly his only true book... about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud." In an essay published in New York in 1999, Kosiński's sometime lover, Laurie Stieber, wrote that he incorporated passages from her letters into the revised and expanded 1981 edition of his 1973 novel The Devil Tree, without asking her. "The allegations in the Voice," wrote Stieber, "combined with what I knew to be true about the revised edition of The Devil Tree, left me with a gnawing mistrust in all aspects of our relationship. I hadn’t wavered, however, from my opinion that he was an extraordinary intellectual and philosopher, a brilliant storyteller and, yes, writer. But ego, and the fear of having his credibility strip-searched by erudite Polish or Russian editors, were behind his insistence on writing in English rather than using translators. By borrowing too greedily, Jerzy inadvertently wrote the Village Voice article himself." Terence Blacker, an English publisher (who helped publish Kosiński's books) and author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote an article published in The Independent in 2002: The significant point about Jerzy Kosiński was that...his books...had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy. Despite repudiation of the Village Voice allegations of plagiarism in detailed articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications, Kosiński remained tainted. "I think it contributed to his death," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a friend and fellow Polish emigrant.

Kosiński was friends with Roman Polanski, with whom he attended the National Film School in Łódź, and said he narrowly missed being at Polanski and Sharon Tate's house on the night Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's followers in 1969, due to lost luggage. His novel Blind Date portrayed the Manson murders. In 1984, Polanski denied Kosiński's story in his autobiography. Journalist John Taylor of New York Magazine believes Polanski was mistaken. "Although it was a single sentence in a 461-page book, reviewers focused on it. But the accusation was untrue: Jerzy and Kiki had been invited to stay with Tate the night of the Manson murders, and they missed being killed as well only because they stopped in New York en route from Paris because their luggage had been misdirected." The reason why Taylor believes this is that "a friend of Kosiński wrote a letter to the Times, which was published in the Book Review, describing the detailed plans he and Jerzy had made to meet that weekend at Polanski's house on Cielo Drive." The letter referenced was written by Clement Biddle Wood. Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had a friendship with Kosiński, is introduced as a character in his novel Blind Date. Kosiński wrote his novel Pinball (1982) for his friend George Harrison, having conceived of the idea for the book at least 10 years before writing it.

• Being There (novel and screenplay, cameo in gala scene, 1979) • Reds (actor, 1981) – Grigory Zinoviev • The Statue of Liberty (1985) – Himself • Łódź Ghetto (1989) – Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (voice) • Religion, Inc. (actor, 1989) – Beggar (final film role) • Nabarvené ptáče (film) (2019, orig. The Painted Bird)

• Oleg Ivsky, Review of The Painted Bird in Library Journal, Vol. 90, October 1, 1965, p. 4109 • Irving Howe, Review of The Painted Bird in Harper's Magazine, October 1965 • Andrew Feld, Review in Book Week, October 17, 1965, p. 2 • Anne Halley, Review of The Painted Bird in Nation, Vol. 201, November 29, 1965, p. 424 • D.A.N. Jones, Review of Steps in The New York Review of Books, Volume 12, Number 4, February 27, 1969 • Irving Howe, Review of Being There in Harper's Magazine, July 1971, p. 89. • David H. Richter, The Three Denouements of Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird", Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3, Summer 1974, pp. 370–85 • Gail Sheehy, "The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man", Psychology Today, December 11, 1977, pp. 126–30 • Margaret Kupcinskas Keshawarz, "Simas Kidirka: A Literary Symbol of Democratic Individualism in Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit", Lituanus (Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences), Vol. 25, No.4, Winter 1979 • Roger Copeland, "An Interview with Jerzy Kosinski", New York Art Journal, Vol. 21, pp. 10–12, 1980 • Robert E. Ziegler, "Identity and Anonymity in the Novels of Jerzy Kosinski", Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2, 1981, pp. 99–109 • Barbara Gelb, "Being Jerzy Kosinski", New York Times Magazine, February 21, 1982, pp. 42–46 • Stephen Schiff, "The Kosinski Conundrum", Vanity Fair, June 1988, pp 114–19 • Thomas S. Gladsky, "Jerzy Kosinski's East European Self", Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Winter 1988, pp. 121–32 • Michael Schumacher, "Jerzy Kosinski", Writer's Yearbook, 1990, Vol. 60, pp. 82–87. • John Corry, "The Most Considerate of Men", American Spectator, Vol. 24, No. 7, July 1991, pp. 17–18 • Phillip Routh, "The Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski", Arts & Opinion, Vol. 6, No. 6, 2007. • Timothy Neale, "'... the credentials that would rescue me': Trauma and the Fraudulent Survivor", Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2010.

He is the subject of the off-Broadway play More Lies About Jerzy (2001), written by Davey Holmes and originally starring Jared Harris as Kosinski-inspired character "Jerzy Lesnewski". The most recent production being produced at the New End Theatre in London starring George Layton. He also appears as one of the 'literary golems' (ghosts) in Thane Rosenbaum's novel The Golems of Gotham. One of the songs of the Polish band NeLL, entitled "Frisco Lights", was inspired by Kosinski.

Jerzy Kosiński was recorded at birth as Józef Lewinkopf. He also worked under the name Joseph Novak. The authorities additionally record the heading Jerzy Kosinski. His recorded languages were English and Polish. He married Kiki Kosinski and Mary Hayward Weir.