When I was younger, I re-read books constantly. I had a finite number of books and what felt like an infinite amount of time. Now the circumstances are reversed: an infinite number of books, and precious few minutes to read them. Re-reading feels like a luxury I can’t justify. So I’ve been ruthlessly culling my library—trying to declutter both my apartment and my brain.
During one of these audits, I found The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, which I read in college for a sociology class. (Oh, how I long for those years, when my sole responsibility was to read.)
As I held the book, I felt an ache—visceral, nostalgic—to read it again. I hadn’t touched it in twelve years, yet I could still recall certain passages with eerie clarity. It’s a brutal novel, based very loosely (and non-autobiographically) on Kosinski’s experience during World War II. As a boy, he was sent into hiding by his parents in rural Poland to avoid Nazi persecution—though in the novel, Poland is never named, and the boy’s identity (Jewish? Roma?) is never confirmed.
What unfolds is a surreal procession of horror: the boy, passed from one village to another, becomes servant and witness to cruelty that defies the imagination. The peasants he encounters are not just unkind—they are grotesque, inhumane, monstrous. Not even the darkest corners of my own mind could conjure such depravity. And through it all, this child—small, alien, utterly alone—tries to make sense of a senseless world. Against all odds, he survives, and is eventually reunited with his parents—damaged, fractured, and barely intact, like the post-war world around him.
In the afterword Kosinski wrote in 1976, ten years after the book’s publication, he reflects:
“As I began to write The Painted Bird, I recalled The Birds, the satirical play by Aristophanes. His protagonists, based on important citizens of ancient Athens, were made anonymous in an idyllic natural realm… One of the villagers’ favorite entertainments was trapping birds, painting their feathers, then releasing them to rejoin their flock. As these brightly colored creatures sought the safety of their fellows, the other birds, seeing them as threatening aliens, attacked and tore at the outcasts until they killed them… I decided I too would set my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present, unrestrained by geography or history. My novel would be called The Painted Bird.”
But of course, Kosinski’s book has a very specific geography, and a very specific history—Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. As a modern reader, it’s impossible to divorce the brutality from its historical context. You can’t make it mythic. You can’t abstract it into metaphor. You can’t forget that this is fiction written by a man who, decades later, killed himself at age 57 by suffocating with a plastic bag.
So I began re-reading The Painted Bird. I made it to page 68. I remembered too much.
And I realized: I didn’t need to read this book again.
