THE PAINTED BIRD

                                     THE PAINTED BIRD BY JERZY KOSINSKI

It"s taken me all week to reread THE PAINTED BIRD.  It is a gruesomely realistic story of a small boy, surviving on his own in Poland during the Holocaust.

As Kosinsky said himself in the Afterward of this book,

"...One of the villagers favorite entertainments was trapping birds, painting their feathers, then releasing them to rejoin their flock.  As theses brightly colored creatures sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them..."

On reading the book, the choice of that title becomes apparent.
It is hard to believe that Kosinsky is the same man who wrote BEING THERE, which was made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacClaine.  Or is it?  The more I think about that movie........

Kosinsky committed sucicide in the early 1990's.

Here is an excerpt from

Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography

A Life Beyond Repair

By James Park Sloan. Dutton. 505 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by D. G. Myers

. The one passage in which the Holocaust is discussed ("Perhaps the world would soon become one vast incinerator for burning people") is immediately followed by a longer scene in which the rape of a Jewish girl is described in brutal and excrutiating detail.

 The Painted Bird is notorious for its horrors: eyeballs are gouged out of sockets, animals are tortured, women are violated with bottles holding manure, men are devoured by rats. "The Germans puzzled me," the boy says. "Was such a destitute, cruel world worth ruling?"

This is the question that Kosinski's whole life was given over to answering. That he died by his own hand suggests that his answer, finally, was No. And so Kosinski joined a line of Holocaust writers- Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Primo Levi-who by committing suicide testified that the world was beyond repair. Although The Painted Bird may not be directly about the Holocaust, although it may not be based on Kosinski's own experiences during the Holocaust, it is nevertheless an indispensable document of the Holocaust. It is perhaps the greatest example of what is coming to be known as a "second- generation" book: a contemporary report of the hell in which a survivor of the Holocaust must live, one generation after the event