The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In
the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the
Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother
spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war,
Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears
she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed.
How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family
had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin,
but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans
could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better.
What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of
each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether
visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of
objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or
in life, was whatever worked best.
Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She
had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may
have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories
had become an important part of his personal capital.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172)
And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting
her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son,
Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German
translation of The Painted Bird:
But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she
spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis,
but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable
statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink.
As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to
maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225)
In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his
mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological:
There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made
clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To
a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before
Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure."
Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father
suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the
father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship
bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with
transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130)
Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail.
Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date
with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his
step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV
documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski):