Jerzy Kosinski: 9A Biography [Hardcover]

James Park Sloan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1996

Drawing on Kosinski's papers, interviews with his family, and research in Eastern Europe, a biography of the late novelist covers his wartime childhood in Poland, his strange sex life, and his suspected ties to the CIA. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hailed as an important young author and thinker with the publication of The Painted Bird, winner of the National Book Award, Jerzy Kosinski ended his life amid allegations of fraud and plagiarism. With accuracy and understanding, Sloan undertakes the unraveling of a complex and confusing life, one that experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, the oppression of totalitarianism, the fruits of celebrity, and the consequences of lies, offering an all-too-human view of a man described as "part victim, part charlatan, and part genius."

From Publishers Weekly

When, from time to time, this lively bio fails to read as literary and critical detective work at its best, it entertains a la a People magazine profile. Sloan treats Kosinski, whom he describes as having a "penchant for telling more than the truth," as a great man, a charming rogue and an impostor all rolled into one. The question is, what percentages of those qualities combined to make up the complete man? Born Jerzy Lewinkopf in Poland in 1933, he came to the U.S. on a student visa in the 1950s, published two anticommunist tracts pseudonymously, married a wealthy, alcoholic widow and became a celebrated novelist with The Painted Bird, which its editor bought thinking that it was nonfiction. Most of his novels were assumed, with Kosinski's encouragement, to be autobiographical. Over the years there were also rumors?culminating in a damning Village Voice article in 1982?that they may well have been, in part, ghost-written, even plagiarized. Sloan weighs these charges, finding them more accurate than not, and also chronicles stories of CIA involvement in Kosinski's early career, his adventures in both New York's high society and its S-M underworld, his impressive tenure as president of PEN and the events leading up to his suicide in 1991. Sloan concludes that Kosinski was a brilliant, troubled con man who nonetheless legitimately won his place in literature with his Painted Bird. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525937846
• ISBN-13: 978-0525937845
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,800,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A life beyond repair, January 30, 2002

By 

D. G. Myers (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jerzy Kosinski: 9A Biography (Hardcover)

Since his suicide in 1991, the literary reputation of Jerzy Kosinski has continued to sink. At one time he was one of the most promising writers on the American scene, pounding out three hits in a row--the cult classic "The Painted Bird", "Steps" (winner of the 1969 National Book Award), and "Being There" (filmed in 1980 with Peter Sellers in the starring role). With their grisly violence and a sexuality bordering upon the sadomasochistic, the books raised Kosinski into the ranks of America's celebrity class.

Even as his star was ascending, however, Kosinski was all but finished as a writer. In June 1982, The Village Voice revealed that Kosinski (for whom English was a second language) had made extensive use of translators and collaborators to write all his books, and then had concealed the fact. The remainder of his life, as he himself said, was spent running from it.

And yet the truth about Jerzy Kosinski, as set forth in this new biography by James Park Sloan, may be even more fascinating. For though he disclaimed the role of spokesman for his generation, he was representative of it in many ways. A creature of postmodernity, he suffered--and celebrated--some of the most destructive pathologies of the age. It was as if he were hellbent on acting out the rupture in human values caused by the Holocaust. That was the central theme of his novels, and of his own life.

Born five months after Hitler came to power, he was the only child of Moses and Elzbieta Lewinkopf, a Jewish couple living in Lodz, Poland. His father changed their name to Kosinski--a more Polish-sounding name--in 1939 when he moved the family 120 miles away to the eastern border of German-held Poland. Here the family waited out the war, passing as Gentiles. Jerzy was carefully instructed to deny he was Jewish if challenged. It was a lesson that took a lifetime to unlearn. After the war, Moses Kosinski threw in with the "reds" against the "white" Polish loyalists, and when the Soviets took control, he was rewarded with a party appointment. For Jerzy his father's position meant a superficially trouble-free postwar existence: high school, photography, girl friends, jazz, cafe society, student-exchange trips to Russia, and the University of Lodz.

Unlike his father, however, he despised communism. Sloan ascribes it to personality--Kosinski disliked conformity, he says--but in reality his anticommunism seems to have been principled enough. Seeing that human values would never be restored to Poland as long as the Communists were in power, Kosinski left the country for the United States in 1959. He did not return for nearly twenty years.

Although he tries to make a case for behind-the-scenes CIA sponsorship of the books, Sloan has no hard information and is not to be trusted on this score: for him, anyone who is anticommunist simply must be a "John Bircher"; the only reason he can imagine for writing an anticommunist book is to further "propaganda efforts directed at the Soviets" while tricking Americans into "accepting high levels of funding for defense and intelligence spending."

Sloan is generally helpless in dealing with ideas. A novelist and teacher of creative writing, he belongs to the vaguely leftist culture of American universities, and treats all writing as more or less fiction. Kosinski, by contrast, was a sharp-minded and lifelong man of the right. Although "The Painted Bird" made him popular with young readers, he scorned the student movement of the sixties. From firsthand experience he knew the falseness of the promise of "liberation."

And yet he also yielded to its allure. Despite his contempt for the political ideas of the young and their so-called "counterculture," Kosinski was an enthusiastic participant in the sexual revolution of the sixties and after.

What was the reason for this sexual adventurism? Sloan sets it down to a love of "sexual theater" that mirrored Kosinski's compulsive need to lie and feign and pose in all areas of his life, compensating for "the hollowness at the core of his being." This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. On this theory, Kosinski emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against intense feelings of hopelessness and abandonment. He even appears somewhat heroic, because he restrained himself from crossing the border into all-out psychosis.

What this theory cannot explain, however, is Kosinski's strong moral opposition to communism and persistent loyalty to political freedom. Naturally, his biographer would like to dismiss Kosinski's political convictions as yet another compulsion. The evidence is otherwise.

Nor can the psychological theory account for the haunting power of Kosinski's one great book--"The Painted Bird". Strictly speaking, it is not a Holocaust book. Like the Vilna ghetto poet Abraham Sutzkever, Kosinski rarely mentions the German exterminators; but unlike Sutzkever (who reserves speech for the Jewish dead), Kosinski aims to exhibit cruelty and backwardness. "The Painted Bird" is notorious for its horrors. "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 it is nevertheless an indispensable document of the Holocaust.

First Things (October 1996)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Losts of information, most of it okay, October 5, 2002

By 

Tracy Houston (Bangor, Maine United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (Mass Market Paperback)

Sloan, while not the most gripping writer, provides a digestible account of Kosinski's life and works. Much of the mythos accorded to Kosinski is addressed, if not fully explained. The largest benefit this book can bring to the reader is a refutation of the oftentimes confused early history of the author. Kosinski allowed and encouraged the public's belief that The Painted Bird was mostly autobiographical in a literal sense. This belief gained popularity to the extent that it has appeared as fact in "about the author" blurbs and websites devoted to Kosinski. Sloan disabuses the reader of this notion and places a much closer version of the reality in the reader's vision. However, he makes many mistakes. As noted by another review, "Sloan Should Have Proof-Read The Manuscripts," he makes several factual errors. He dispells some myths but clings to others despite facts to the contrary. Sloan interviewed Kiki (Kosinski's widow), as well as many others. Kiki told him that the story of Kosinski's arrival, in Poland, at his publisher's buisness in a limo with American flags was not true. In reality, Kosinski had come downstairs from a meeting. No car was involved, yet Sloan kept the myth. Such disregard for his sources and perpetration of myth makes me wonder what else Sloan did not accurately explain.
For the reader casually interested in Kosinski, I encourage reading Sloan's work as it does explore Kosinski's life quite in depth. For the scholar of Kosinski, it's a useful addition to the library, but not the first one to be turned to for understanding.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting book., September 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (Mass Market Paperback)

I had read "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski, before I read the biography by J. Sloan. "The painted bird" is a powerful book and I wondered about the author. A lot of things made sense to me after reading the biography. Sloan has written a very interesting book , but I feel that he has written too much of his own analysis. If Sloan knew Kosinski for about 20 years, there is no mention of a single event of that in the whole book. I found this kind of surprising, since the book is a memoir. In spite of all the controversies surrounding Kosinski, he is still a great story teller.