Palimpsest: Autobiography in Hiding

• In Event: Here there are only words: Memorial Literature of the Holocaust

Abstract

Fraudulent survivor narratives fuel Holocaust denial, so we must challenge questionable texts while retaining genuine efforts. Late in his career, Jerzy Kosinski was accused of not having lived the life depicted in THE PAINTED BIRD, of having falsely claimed he was a Christian, and of not writing his books, but instead secretly utilizing editors and translators to ghost their creation. Ruth Franklin writes in A THOUSAND DARKNESSES that backlash from these claims resulted in his work being jettisoned from the canon of Holocaust literature.
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My paper argues that this literary shunning is a mistake that stops us from learning about aspects of psychological trauma experienced by a child who survived the Holocaust in hiding. First, expectations that Kosinski should have been able to recount his childhood in detail are at odds with known traumatic memory challenges of child survivors. Second, although his early denial of being Jewish is viewed as proof of a mendacious character, Israeli psychologist Yvonne Tauber’s work with adults who survived the Holocaust as hidden children indicates that some felt themselves to be Gentiles after the war and did not welcome the idea of re-identifying with the Jewish people.
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Last, my paper argues that critics fail to recognize how the life-or-death necessity of hiding in childhood colored his artistic output as an adult. An unpublished essay in his archives at Yale’s Beinecke Library strongly suggests the absence of overt autobiography came in response to parental request. To comply with this demand, he developed strategies like keyword coding to conceal genuine autobiography from his readers, in this way establishing a unique textual thumbprint. An example is found in THE HERMIT OF 69TH STREET, his final novel. Attempting to clarify a famous, contested scene in THE PAINTED BIRD, Kosinski essentially erased the earlier book’s original story and replaced it with a different narrative arc, while maintaining keyword traces to link both novels. This palimpsest was created by a complex literary maneuver that could not have been accomplished by a ghostwriter or editor. Such evidence rebuts critics’ claims that Kosinski was a fraud, suggesting scholars need to revisit his disappearance from the canon of Holocaust literature.

Author

• Carolyn Sofia, Stony Brook University