Jerzy Kosinski Essay Research Paper Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosinski Essay, Research Paper

Jerzy Kosinski was born in Poland in 1933 to Russian parents who had fled the revolution. He was separated from his family when the Nazis invaded in 1939. For six years he wandered form village to village scorned by East European gypsies who feared his hawk like face and penetrating eyes. He survived German terror by his wits and he was struck dumb from the shock that he underwent from this six-year period of wandering. He was mute from age nine to fourteen.(New Yorker) Kosinski was later reunited with his family and by the time he was twenty-four, he attained a professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Soon after Kosinski got his job as a professor, he went to America. Within four months of Kosiski s arrival in America, he spoke fluent English and moved on to Columbia University. He soon had a great novelist career. He was earning national awards, was married to a millionaire socialite, was earning huge sums of money for his books and screenplay, and played a small part in a movie. He was truly living the American dream . (Times Mirror Co.) Kosinski s suicide in 1991 at age fifty-eight shocked the outside world, but didn t surprise many of his friends. Ever since Kosinski had come to the U.S in 1957, he had become known for his spectrum of sociopathic behavior ranging from mere megalomania to brutal sexual coercion, fraud, and plagiarism. Kosinski was a pathological liar and a control freak. Some say he couldn t help his lying because any Jew who lived through the Holocaust had to lie to live. It was in Nazi, Poland that Kosinski became an expert storyteller. (JK; pg. 97) Kosinski s third novel, Being There, is about a mentally retarded middle aged man named Chance. Chance has always lived in a townhouse where he tended the garden. The only thing he did except tend to the garden, was watch television. A cook named Louis prepared his meals. When the old man who ran the townhouse died, Chance was expelled from the house. He went outside and started to walk down the street when a car belonging to Elizabeth Eve Rand hit him. Elizabeth Eve, or EE, was married to one of the richest men in America and the confidant of presidents. The Rands took Chance into their home where they misheard his name as Chauncey Gardiner. When Chance was asked about his past, he described the only thing he was able to describe. This was the garden where he worked his whole life. Everyone took what he said as a metaphor. As Mr. Rand was dying, chance accompanied EE to a diplomatic reception where his comments were taken as sage commentary. He was invited to appear in a nationwide television show where his garden metaphor reassures the public in a moment of financial crisis. By the end of the book, important power brokers propose Chance as a candidate for vice president. Kosinski got his idea for Being There in the summer of 1965. His wife Mary took him along to a townhouse in Manhattan to visit a man in his eighties who owned a lot of first-rate old American furniture. Mary s mission was to convince the man to will his furniture to the Metropolitan Museum. When Mary went upstairs to see the old man, Kosinski looked around the downstairs of the townhouse. He found a passageway that led to a beautiful garden in the back which was set off from the street by a high wall. In the garden was a well-dressed, middle-aged man who watched a television that could be seen from a window as he spoke to Kosinski. A few days later, Kosinski ran into the lawyer who was handling the old man s estate and had arranged for Mary s visit. The Lawyer at first couldn t recall a man working in the garden and when he did he said that he didn t know his name or anything else about him except that he had lived in the house his entire life. This man became Chance the Gardener in Kosinski s third novel. (JK; pg. 201) It seems from the surface that the mentally challenged Chance has no resemblance to the quick-witted Kosinski. Yet, there is an underlying correspondence between Kosinski s character, Chance, and Kosinski himself. Both men were without a traceable past. No one really knows about Kosinski s experiences during the Second World War or much about any of his pre-American life. Many believe that his accounts of his childhood are untrue and he made them up for entertainment purposes. The same is true with Chance. Chance is simply a gardener. No one knows where he was born or who his were or anything about him. Chance himself doesn t even know where he was from. All he remembers is the old man, working in the garden and watching television. Both Chance and Kosinski lived on a tight rope and every minute there was the threat of falling. Chance was not even close to the person he was thought to be. Throughout the whole book the reader is anxious and scared for Chance for there is a fear that at any minute, someone will find out who chance is and everything will be ruined. Kosinski went through his whole life with the fear that the reader feels for chance. Starting with Kosinski s childhood, his life was full of lies. When Kosinski was young, he lied to the Nazis and everyone else who he encountered. He had to hide his Jewish identity and was always afraid of being exposed. When he was older, many believe Kosinski plagiarized other s works and required his assistants to sign false releases for him. He was also a pathological liar. Because of these things, he was at risk of being exposed ju