leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (08/24/85)
THE PAINTED BIRD by Jerzy Kosinski
Bantam, 1965 (rev. 1978), $3.95.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: THE PAINTED BIRD is a harrowing experience. It
follows a Gypsy boy through his first-hand experiencing of much more cruelty
than most of us can imagine. It is a powerful novel, but the reader should
have some idea of what he is getting into before reading it. This is real-
life horror on a massive scale.
I have heard it claimed to be *the great mystery* of the Twentieth
Century: "How could so many basically good people--people from all
nationalities across Europe--participate in mass murder and true genocide?"
Nobody comes closer to answering that question than Jerzy Kosinski in THE
PAINTED BIRD. Kosinski paints a picture of peasant life in Eastern Europe
in which the people could have slipped into the Holocaust without ever
noticing the difference. For these ignorant and superstitious people, the
Holocaust did not start in this century, but was a continuation of one long
Holocaust that had been going on since the beginning of time against Gypsies
and Jews, against people with Black hair, against unfaithful wives, against
birds and horses and dogs. Among most of civilization, the book seems to
say, callousness and cruelty are part of the daily way of life and its
victims can be just about anyone, as close as a husband or wife or as
distant as an insect. In the view of this novel, we sit here on an island
of relative--only relative--civilization looking out on an ocean of barbaric
history. Our eye fastens on one Holocaust and we ask ourselves, where did
that barbarity comes from? In fact, it is just one incident in centuries of
barbaric cruelty.
The title of THE PAINTED BIRD comes from the sport of one of the
characters in the book. He would catch a blackbird and paint the wings
blue, the head red, the chest green. Then he would release it. The bird
would try to rejoin the flock, but they would see the paint, the superficial
differences, and would peck the bird to death. It is a vicious and cruel
sport and as such it is just one more vicious and cruel aspect of peasant
life and Kosinski's novel shows us dozens. But it is the central metaphor
of the book because one can take it a step further and ask, why does it even
work? The painted bird is merely returning to the same flock it left, birds
it has flown with for months. Even birds will take any superficial excuse
to pick out one of their numbers and subject it to pain and death.
So how did the Holocaust happen? Was it simply one German political
party which found a little co-operation among a handful of peasants while
the vast majority remained ignorant or looked on in horror? If that is your
view of history, it is indeed a mystery how the Holocaust took place. But
that isn't how it happened. The Holocaust could not have happened without
releasing the ignorant hatred and cruelty of a lot of common people that
today it is easier to think of as just plain good folk. It was not a
difficult task for the Nazis to point out some "painted birds" to the common
folk and let in-bred ignorance and hatred take its course. That has to be
the way it was done by the Nazis and the Stalinists and the Maoists and the
Khmer Rouge--there have been many Holocausts in the last fifty years alone.
What we call "the Holocaust" was just the one closest to the Western news
and information sources.
THE PAINTED BIRD follows one Gypsy boy in an odyssey around Eastern
Europe during World War II. But much of the inhumanity the boy sees has
little or nothing to do with the fact that a war is going on. Most of what
he sees could have happened any time since the Middle Ages. Scenes of
children torturing animals for fun or grown men standing by and watching
rape and murder could and do take place today in our own country. Kosinski
does not try to explain why there is the callousness and cruelty the boy
observes and often suffers. In most cases it makes little more sense than
the peasants hating the boy out of fear that his black hair will attract
lightning. But we do see that it feeds upon itself. At the beginning of
the book the boy is purely a victim. By the end of the book he himself is
involved in senseless murders. He has evolved from victim into victimizer.
THE PAINTED BIRD is as unpleasant as any novel you are likely to find.
A case might be made that it is unrealistic to see all the gruesome
incidents that are described in this story. Still, it is a deeply affecting
book. It says a lot about humanity most of us would rather not think about.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper