Kosinski jerzy biography of nancy

Polish-American writer Jerzy Kosinski — authored three of the most widely read novels of the s and s: The Painted Bird, Steps , and Being There , the last of which also became a hit film. Kosinski spent much of his childhood amid the chaos of World War II , when making up a convincing story about one's actions and one's identity could literally mean the difference between life and death.

He was a skilled storyteller, not only in his books but also when it came to his own life, and after his career hit its peak many of the established facts of his biography were called into question. He was charged with plagiarism and relying on editors to produce the actual texts of his books.

Sloan's Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (New York: Dutton, ) chronicles Kosinski's life story and exposes many of his half-truths, masks, and other.

Kosinski defended himself vigorously against these accusations, and he was backed up by major journalistic and literary figures who concluded that the author's biographical facts extended far back into his tangled past. Kosinski wove a tangled web with his life and work, and the controversies that surrounded him were still present 15 years after his death, by suicide, in The reputations of his major novels were little touched, however; remaining widely available in inexpensive editions and discovered by new generations of readers.

His parents, Moses and Elzbieta Lewinkopf, were Jewish professionals; Moses Lewinkopf was a translator and a scholar of classical literature, and Elzbieta was a concert pianist who had attended the Moscow Conservatory in Russia. They found themselves in grave danger when German troops overran Poland in , and they made the decision to try to pass as Gentile, moving to a small town in eastern Poland and telling their six-year-old son to deny he was Jewish if asked.

Moses Lewinkopf changed his name to Mieczyslaw Kosinski, and his son went for a time by the name of Jurek Kosinski.

Jerzy Kosinski Reaches Down into Life and Writes Wayne Warga.

What Kosinski experienced as a child amid the most horrible depths of World War II and the Holocaust may never be known. He drew on his experiences during this period, however, in The Painted Bird , a gruesome novel in which a young boy wanders through a nightmarish European landscape, experiencing torture at the hands of strangers and witnessing act after act of extreme cruelty.

At one point the boy loses the power of speech after being thrown into a pit of manure. The boy is called the Gypsy, but his ethnic identity is left hazy. Kosinski intimated early in his American career that the novel was based on fact, and it was often described as semi-autobiographical. He later retreated to the position that the stories in the book were realistic, given established accounts of the horrors perpetrated on ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe.

Asked by the London Guardian shortly before his death whether he had experienced the events described in the book, Kosinski replied, "I don't want to say, even to myself.