The Painted Bird Book

The cover of the Mass Market Paperback edition from the 1970s of The Painted Bird features a small section of Hieronymus Bosch hell-landscape -- dressed in sickly green and wearing a white hood, a creature with a man's body and head of a long-beaked bird walks on crutches carrying a large wicker basket on its back, and in the basket a small black devil with spiky fingers touches the shoulder of a wary young boy as he whispers into the boy's ear. This is an apt cover for Jerzy Kosinski's fictionalized autobiographical novel set in Poland during the reign of Nazi terror in World War 11.

I first read this harrowing tale thirty-five years ago. I have read many dark, disturbing novels filled with brutality of every stripe, including such works as Malamud's The Fixer, Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but, in my view, perhaps because the narrator is a ten year old boy, no novel has its main character live through a more painful hell than in The Painted Bird.

Several months after reading this novel, the author himself made a visit to a large bookstore in Philadelphia for a book-signing, so I had an opportunity to actually meet him - a small man with a thin, high pitched voice and sharp, chiseled fine features, a man who struck me as being both sensitive and friendly. He appreciated my words of thanks and told me, when asked, that he was heading to New Orleans and expected to have some exciting times.

Anyway, that was then. Several days ago I saw my local library had a copy of The Painted Bird audio book and immediately checked it out. I started also rereading the printed book as I listened to the audio. The reader, Fred Berman, did his homework - his accent and inflection and manner of speaking is spot-on Jerzy Kosinski.

If you are unfamiliar, this story is of an orphan boy with black eyes and sharp nose, labeled gypsy-Jew, forced to wander from village to village, subjected physically to beatings, rape, tortures, as well as murder attempts, while subjected psychologically to being treated as a messenger of the devil and an evil spirit who casts spells with a glance from his black eyes.

The boy is so traumatized from unrelenting abuse, he completely losses his capacity to speak for many months. The abuse reaches such a pitch, at one point he reflects on the nature of evil: "I tried to visualize the manner in which the evil spirits operated. The minds and souls of people were as open to these forces as a plowed field, and it was on this field that the Evil Ones incessantly scattered their malignant seed. If their seed sprouted to life, if they felt welcomed, they offered all the help which might be needed, on the condition that it would be used for selfish purposes and only to the detriment of others. From the moment of signing a pact with the Devil, the more harm, misery, injury, and bitterness a man could inflict on those around him, the more help he could expect." Quite the musings from a ten year old! Just goes to show how extreme was his direct experience of the forces of evil.

If you are up for an unforgettable experience of terror expressed in the clear, vivid literary language of a fine writer, then you are ready for The Painted Bird.


"There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden."
― Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird