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THE PAINTED BIRD

Novel by Jerzy Kosinski, 1965

The Painted Bird (1965) remains a powerful work of Holocaust fiction, even though it makes few direct references to the Shoah beyond the occasional appearance of Nazi soldiers or trains carrying Jews to the camps. Throughout the book, however, we feel the presence of a world made possible by the dehumanizing values of the Third Reich. This brutal, episodic, and matter-of-fact narrative begins with a nameless six-year-old boy who is placed by his parents in the fall of 1939 with a peasant foster mother. When the foster mother dies, the boy is left on his own. Not only is he nameless, but so is the European country where the story occurs, and the boy—taken by the peasants for a Gypsy or a Jew—is not given an ethnic identity.

Most readers have assumed the country to be Poland and the boy Kosinski. The author himself was cagy about his life, and his publisher was unsure whether to market the narrative as history or fiction. A number of the book's episodes are so clearly fantastic that it is now difficult to believe they were taken as factual, but readers closer in time to the Holocaust were more willing to accept the book as "truthful." Houghton Mifflin had legal concerns about such issues as slander, and the publisher finally decided to market the book as a novel, although this did not stop readers from treating its story as factual. Polish critics, for instance, reading the book in English (it was not translated until much later), interpreted it as a slander on Poland. Kosinski, unlike the book's protagonist, had survived the war in relatively comfortable circumstances, helped by his family's name change (from Lewinkopf) and their denial of their Jewish identity. Reacting to his various critics, Kosinski wrote a long essay called "Notes of the Author on The Painted Bird " (1965) that he published himself as a booklet. In it he justified his novel as being a kind of heroic fairy tale in the tradition of folk fiction.

The title comes from a folk legend enacted in one of the sections. In it a peasant captures a bird that he paints with bright colors. When he sets the bird free, it flies up to its native flock, which then attacks it because of its altered coloration, pecking at it viciously until it falls bloodily to earth. We associate the boy with the painted bird, rejected by its fellows because it looks different. In almost every episode of The Painted Bird, the boy experiences alienation, rejection, or violence at the hands of the peasants to whom he goes for protection.

The book's episodic structure reminds one of the pica-resque novel, and the abrupt juxtaposition of most episodes without transition puts it also in the tradition of modernist fiction. The boy narrator's detached tone is particularly effective as he describes without emotional embellishment one scene after another of physical and sexual violence. This forces the reader to interact with the text throughout. Some critics have complained about the story's excessive violence; others have said that no amount of narrative violence was adequate to reflect what really happened during the war years. The novel contains a lot of mesmerizing action that represents individuals behaving in primitive and unrestrained ways. In an early scene a simpleminded peasant woman is slain by a group of village women jealous of her sexuality. They beat her without mercy, finally jamming a bottle full of excrement into her vagina and kicking it until it explodes. The boy witnesses a scene in which a peasant who is jealous of attentions a farmhand has paid his wife gouges out the boy's eyeballs, one at a time, with a spoon. In another scene a girl receives sexual attention from both her father and brother, finally being asked to couple with a goat. In yet another episode the boy witnesses the invasion of a village by Kalmuck soldiers who proceed to ravish both women and children, sometimes on horseback, before the Kalmucks themselves are shot by Russian liberators.

Just past the middle of the book the boy has been accepted as a Christian and has begun his religious training. While working as an altar boy, he drops the missal during a service, for which he is chased, beaten, and thrown into a pit of human excrement. After he pulls himself out, the boy discovers that he has lost his voice. Again we are asked to see the larger implications of this silence, a condition that continues until the book's last page, when the boy recovers his voice while talking on the telephone.

The book's final episodes occur after Russian liberators have arrived and the boy, while still mute, is protected by a few of them. Although these chapters are not as effective as the earlier ones, they do allow the narrator to reflect on the lessons he has learned from his experiences—that revenge, silence, and brotherhood are all essential elements needed for survival. When, at the end, the boy returns to his parents, he is not happy to see them. What he has learned has made him feel like a painted bird, a condition that is, no doubt, shared by many survivors.