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