THE PAINTED BIRD

"For the man of judgment,

being alone and being wrong
are one and the same thing..."
Jean-Paul Sartre.

The theme that unites this book – which throughout the chapters links a great variety of
apparently diverse themes that are presented in it – is the idea of the scapegoat and its
function in the moral metabolism of society. In particular I have tried to show that social
man fears the Other and tries to destroy him; but that paradoxically needs this Other and,
if necessary, creates him, so that – by invalidating him as bad – he can confirm himself as
good. These ideas are conveyed with consummate artistic skill by Jerzy Kosinski in his
extraordinary book "The Painted Bird . " The title alludes to this same theme: The Painted
Bird is the symbol of the persecuted Other, of "The Spotted Man."
The story is a distressing tale that tells us what happens to a six-year-old boy "from a
large city in Eastern Europe (who) during the first weeks of World War II... was sent by his
parents to the "Like thousands of other children, to a distant village in search of safety." To
protect his son from the ruins of war in the capital; His parents, belonging to the middle
class, entrust him to the care of a peasant woman. Two months after her arrival, she died.
The parents do not know and the child has no means at his disposal to contact them. He
finds himself adrift in an ocean of humanity that is sometimes indifferent, often hostile
and rarely protective.
During his pilgrimages through the countryside of devastated Poland, the boy lives for
a time under the protection of Lekh, a young man of strong build, solitary but honest, who
earns his living as a trapper. It is this episode that so poignantly expresses the theme that
for the tribe the Other is a dangerous stranger, the member of a hostile species that must
be destroyed.
Lekh loves a woman, Ludmila, with whom he has passionate sexual relations. Ludmila
had been raped when she was a teenage girl and by the time we meet her, she is crazy
with sexual desire. The farmers call her “stupid Ludmila.” The episode that interests us
occurs after a period of separation between Lekh and Ludmila. I will transcribe it in full.
«Sometimes days passed and Stupid Ludmila did not appear in the forest. Then Lekh
felt possessed by a dull rage. He looked only at the caged birds, murmuring something to
himself. Finally, after a long examination, he chose the strongest bird, tied it to his wrist
and prepared smelly paintings of different colors, which he composed from the most
varied elements. When the colors satisfied him, he would turn the bird on its back and
paint its wings, head, and breast with the colors of the rainbow, until it was more vivid
and dappled than a bouquet of wildflowers.
Afterwards, we entered the thicket. Once there, Lekh took the painted bird and ordered
me to hold it with my hands, pressing it lightly. The bird began to chirp and call to a flock
of its own species, which was flying nervously over our heads. Our prisoner, hearing
them, struggled to go towards them, singing louder and with his heart beating violently
locked in his freshly painted chest.
Once a sufficient number of birds had gathered above our heads, Lekh signaled to me
to release the prisoner. He soared free and happy, like a spot of rainbow standing out
against the background of clouds, and dove among the band that was waiting for him. For
a few moments, the birds remained confused. The painted bird circled from one end of the
flock to the other, trying to convince his tribe that he was one of them. But, bewildered by
its brilliant colors, they flew around it unconvinced. The painted bird was pushed further
and further away, despite its attempts to penetrate the ranks of its peers. Shortly after we
saw how one after another the birds launched a fierce attack. Very soon that shape of a
thousand colors disappeared from the sky and fell to the earth. These incidents happened
often. When we finally found the painted birds, they were usually dead. Lekh carefully
examined the number of wounds they had received. Blood flowed down its colored wings,
diluting the paint and staining Lekh's hands.
However, Stupid Ludmila does not return. To vent his frustrated anger, Lekh prepares
another sacrifice. Let's see how Kosinski describes it:
«One day he caught a huge crow, whose wings he painted red, his chest green, and his
tail blue. When a flock of crows appeared over our hut, Lekh released the painted bird. As
soon as he joined his companions, a desperate battle began. The transformed bird found
itself attacked from all sides. Black, red, green and blue feathers began to fall at our feet.
The crows fluttered frantically in the sky and suddenly the painted crow opened its beak
and tried in vain to move its wings. Its eyes had been pecked out and fresh blood flowed
from its painted feathers. He made a new attempt to get up from the sticky earth, but he
had no strength left.
The Painted Bird is the perfect symbol of the Other, the Stranger, the Propitiatory
Victim. With inimitable mastery, Kosinski shows us the two sides of the phenomenon: if
the Other differentiates himself from the members of the flock, he is thrown out of the
destroyed group; If it is equal to them, man intervenes and makes it appear different, so
that it can be expelled and destroyed. Just as Lekh paints his crow; psychiatrists change
the color of their patients and society, globally considered, stains its citizens. This is the
great tragedy of discrimination, invalidation and the creation of scapegoats. Man seeks,
creates and imputes differences to better alienate the Other. By expelling the Other, the
Just Man exalts himself and vents his frustrated anger in a way that his fellow men
approve. For man, a herd animal, just as for his non-human ancestors, security lies in
similarity. This is why conformity is good and divergence is bad. Emerson understood this
very well. "Everywhere society conspires against the virility of each of its members," he
warned, "Virtue, most of the time, is conformity. Self-confidence is its opposite."
Anyone who appreciates individual freedom, human diversity and respect for people
cannot help but feel discouraged by such a spectacle. For those who believe, like me, that
the doctor should be a protector of the individual, even when he or she comes into conflict
with society, it is especially disheartening that, in our days, painting birds has become an
accepted medical activity and that, Among the colors used, psychiatric diagnoses are the
most fashionable.
THOMAS SZASZ

Unintentionally, the flight of the Painted Birds has come into my hands, the true is beyond what is
seen, what is smelled, what is touched, what is heard, barely shells of what is underlying and
essential, the essential is linked to the affective.
Tabarez
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The bird painted by César VIDAL

There is an old tradition in Poland that tragically reveals the extent to which cruelty is not the
preserve of adults but is an undeniable part of the children's universe. The game is as follows: a
group of children captures a bird, paints its feathers a different color, and then releases it among
other members of its species. Far from welcoming their companion – that is the tragic grace of the
game – the birds look at the unfortunate little animal of a different shade and begin to peck it to
death. Without a doubt, he is one of their own, but they are unable to see him as such.

The distressing image was used by Jerzy Kosinski for his novel "The Painted Bird." I have returned
to this book several times and it always makes me especially uneasy. A child – surely Jewish – is
left by his parents in the care of strangers to survive in Holocaust Poland. The creature, however,
despite being as human as any other child, is, in reality, a painted bird. Few images would have
been more appropriate to the genocide than that of that animal that is the same and, yet, only
receives blows from its fellow humans who seek to take its life with a certain degree of amusement.
The Russian "intelligentsia", which the Bolsheviks exterminated, could only be accused of a
deplorable naivety in its very nobility of spirit, but it was shot and sent to the Gulag by the millions.

From Kafka to Roth

The Jews of Europe during the Holocaust were poor ghetto tenants in deeply anti-Semitic Poland
or members of an intellectual elite in Austria or Germany. It gave the same. The people from whom
Kafka, Freud, Mahler and Roth had emerged were sent to the gas chambers. They were equal, but
they had already been painted with the dirty tones of anti-Semitism and could only expect pecks
from their contemporaries until their death. Rarely has an image been so accurate and so timely to
remember in these days.
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Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski (born Josek Lewinkopf ) (1933 – 1991) was an American novelist of Polish origin.
His best-known works are The Painted Bird (1965) and From the Garden (1971).

Childhood, studies and marriage

Kosinski's real name was Josek Lewinkopf. He was born in Lodz, Poland, on June 18, 1933, so he
was a child when World War II began. He survived the massacres by changing his name to Jerzy
Kosinski and posing as a Catholic, taken in by a peasant family in Eastern Poland thanks to the
efforts of his father, who even obtained a false baptismal certificate for him.
After World War II, Kosinski reunited with his parents and studied history and political science at
the University of Lodz, working as an assistant at the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1957 he
emigrated to the United States.
He graduated from Columbia University and taught at Yale, Princeton and other universities. In
1965 he obtained American citizenship.
He married Mary Hayward Weir in 1962, who died in 1968 due to brain cancer. Later, he remarried
Katherina von Fraunhofer.

Construction site
Kosinski's novels routinely appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. They have been
translated into more than 30 languages, and total sales were estimated at around 70 million copies in
1991.

The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird relates the experience of a boy (of unknown religion and ethnicity, although of
Jewish and Gypsy appearance) who wanders helplessly through the rural areas of Eastern Poland
before and during the Second World War. His aimless journey through a cruel, ignorant and
superstitious world becomes a metaphor for the human condition.
The novel, in which autobiographical reminiscences have been sought (although Kosinski has
denied that it is an autobiography in the strict sense), was considered by Arthur Miller, Elie Wiesel
and others as one of the most important works of contemporary literature. Holocaust . Thus,
Weisel, for example, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that it was "one of the best... written
with profound sincerity and sensitivity."
Following the book's publication in the United States, Kosinski was accused in his native country of
being unpatriotic due to his unsparing description of rural Poland. The accusations intensified in
1968, with the anti-Jewish campaign launched by the Polish authorities, which forced many Jews to
leave the country.
The book was banned in Poland and other Eastern European countries, and the author received
personal threats, including an attempted attack on his own home by two Polish immigrants who
reminded him a lot of the peasants he knew in his childhood. . Kosinski was hurt that Poles hated
his book and him without even having had the opportunity to read it.
Finally, it was published in Poland in 1989. In Warsaw, thousands of copies were sold in a short
time and people queued for several hours to buy books autographed by the author. 2 The literary
critic and professor at the University of Warsaw, Paweł Dudziak, described The Painted Bird as a
great work and highlighted its symbolic aspect, arguing that the accusations of unpatrioticness made
no sense since the descriptions of the environments and the characters that appeared in the book
they were not to be taken literally.
However, reception to the book was not uniformly positive. "When Kosinski's Painted Bird was
translated into Polish – wrote Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski – it was read by the people with whom the
Lewinkopf family had lived during the war. They were shocked by stories of abuse that had never
happened. They recognized the names of some Jewish children they helped during the war, children
who survived because of them, now represented as victims of their abuse. "They were furious at
Jerzy's ingratitude."
In subsequent reissues, Kosinski explained that both the nationality and race of his characters had
been hidden to prevent misinterpretations, and insisted that the novel was not an autobiography, but
a metaphor for the confrontation between human beings in their most defenseless state. (a child) and
society in its most inhuman state (war).

Steps
Pasos (1968), a novel constructed from fragments with a strong autobiographical content, is
probably his most prestigious novel. It won the National Book Award in 1969.
In 1975, Chuck Ross (a writer from Los Angeles) conducted an experiment with this novel: he sent
21 pages of the book to four publishers signed with the pseudonym Erik Demos. The book was
returned by all publishers, including Random House, which had published Kosinski's novel. In 1981
he repeated the experiment, but this time sending the entire novel. The result was the same.

from the garden

From the Garden (1971) is a short, simple and fun novel, with a very different tone from the other
two, which, beneath its apparent calm, attacks the superficiality of the modern world.
It was made into a film in the film Welcome Mr. Chance in 1979, directed by Hal Ashby and starring
Peter Sellers. Kosinski participated in the writing of the script and won an Academy Award for it.

Controversies
Kosinski's life and work is as full of dark areas as his works, to the point that Kosinski himself
sometimes seems like a fictional character.
According to the American writer, essayist, editor and translator Eliot Weinberger, Kosinski could
not have been the author of The Painted Bird because he did not sufficiently master the English
language at the time of its publication (he had only been in the United States for six years). M.A.
Orthofer qualifies Weinberger's claim by saying that Kosinski himself was a fake in some ways,
because he appeared to be someone he was not in reality (like many of the characters in his books).
The best forgeries are those that sow doubt about what part of them is true and what part is not.
In Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography , by James Park Sloan, D. g. Myers argues that the events recounted
in The Painted Bird are fictional and were passed off as autobiographical on the advice of the
editors.

Stokes' article
In June 1982, an article published in the Village Voice and signed by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot
Fremont-Smith directly accused Kosinski of plagiarism. They claimed that much of their work was
taken from Polish sources, which were inaccessible to Western readers. They cited, for example,
that From the Garden had a strong resemblance to Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy — a well-known 1932
Polish novel written by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz. They also pointed out that Kosinski had
written The Painted Bird in Polish, and then secretly had it translated into English for publication.
Another serious accusation, based on stylistic and punctuation differences between some novels and
others, maintained that Kosinski and his editors were using uncredited writers at that time to write
their works. The New York poet and translator George Reavey claimed to have written The Painted
Bird for Kosinski, although not much attention was paid to it.
The article also presented a different view of Kosinski's life during World War II, later supported by
Polish biographer Joanna Siedlecka and by Sloan. The article claimed that The Painted Bird seemed
to be semi-autobiographical, but that it was pure fiction, since Kosinski had spent the entire war
hiding with a Catholic family and had not been mistreated.
The British writer and editor Terence Blacker responded to this article in 2002, pointing out that
Kosinski's books had a consistent vision and voice among them, and that the author's real problem
was that he had aroused a lot of envy because of his lifestyle ( unconventional and abundant in
excess) and its success.
John Corry, a controversial figure in his own right, defended Kosinski in an article published in the
New York Times in 1982. Among other things, Corry alleged that the theory that Kosinski was a
forger and a plagiarist, and that he was in the pay of the CIA, was spread by the Polish communist
government to discredit him.
Another argument of Kosinski's defenders was that, by relying on the stylistic differences between
his different works to support the theory of plagiarism, his detractors seemed to forget that these
same differences exist in almost all authors if a sufficiently long period of time is considered.
Kosinski himself responded that he had never said that his books were autobiographical. In 1988, he
wrote Te Hermit of 68th Street , in which he demonstrated the absurdity of research into his
previous work by inserting footnotes into virtually every word in the book.
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