S5E10 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Jerzy Kosiński (1933-91) was the most successful Polish émigré writer in the United States during the twentieth century in terms of popular recognition, having his novels made as major motion pictures, appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere, and moving in elite political, cultural, and entertainment circles. That success was followed by a dramatic downfall as he was accused of plagiarism in the case of Being There and of falsely allowing readers to believe that his first novel, The Painted Bird, was an autobiographical account of his own experiences during the Holocaust. And yet his works remain in print, and he continues to be an influential writer.

In this episode we consider that dramatic rise and fall, revisit the charges against him, and ask what remains of his most important works, and what aspects of his life experience may have been ignored by the critics. We also consider the ways in which he was a writer between two worlds, writing and publishing his fiction in English like Joseph Conrad, but inextricable from his Polish literary background and cultural context.

Recommended resources discussed in this episode:

Jerzy Kosiński. Being There. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1999.

Jerzy Kosiński. The Painted Bird. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1995.

James Park Sloan. Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography. New York: Dutton/Penguin, 1996.

Kosiński’s bio page and all books available from Grove/Atlantic                                                               

Irena Grudzińska Gross was involved in the student movement and emigrated from her native Poland after the unrest of 1968. She resumed her studies in Italy and received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught courses in East European literature and history at several universities and was 2018 Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include Miłosz and the Long Shadow of War, 2020, Golden Harvest (with Jan T. Gross), 2012; Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 2009; and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, 1995. Her most recent book in Polish is a biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (Znak 2025).

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer