A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski’s wartime struggles and postwar fictions.
Jerzy
A Novel
Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There) and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works.
Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators—a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin’s daughter—who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski’s personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity.
New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection
Evening Standard “Best Summer Beach Read” selection
Bloomington Public Library “Next Reads Recommended Title” selection
Literary Hub “Indie Press Book We’re Looking Forward To” selection
Big Other “Most Anticipated Small Press Book” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781942658153
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781942658146
Enjoy a long-form review of Jerzy in the New Yorker, then read an excerpt from the novel in Stay Thirsty Magazine and an interview with author Jerome Charyn at Comics Grinder.
Listen to Jerome Charyn and Tom Teicholz discuss the life and legacy of Jerzy Kosinski on Rare Bird Radio.
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.
visit author page »Praise for Jerzy
Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that’s still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. His prose has some of the rapid-fire but carefully controlled energy of Thomas Pynchon’s early novella The Crying of Lot 49. Part of Charyn’s point is to make the real and the imagined sound equally implausible. . . . Charyn’s other point seems much broader: to show that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think.
For Charyn, Kosinski is that larger-than-life enigmatic Citizen Kane. . . . What Charyn’s novel can do, with its brilliant satirical bite, is compel readers to learn more about Jerzy Kosinski, one of the great writers of the 20th century. . . . It’s not a simple story, as Charyn’s novel attests. Truth is stranger than fiction and fiction seeks a greater truth.
Charyn presents a mighty Kosinski in a few dimensions. . . . Perhaps there is even no true Jerzy but merely a myth of many sizes, and one, as Charyn’s novel demonstrates a half-century after the publication of The Painted Bird, we keep on recreating to our mind’s delight.
— Confrontation
Charyn peels back the layers of myth and artifice built up by chameleon-like Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski. . . . [His] clever novel underscores the sense that Kosinski was a man impossible to nail down, given to wild changes in personality and appearance depending on his own wealth, desires, and mood. Through triangulating voices and stories, Charyn manages to get close to the truth, and does so with beautiful, spare prose.
Is [Jerzy Kosinski] really who and what he claims to be? . . . Author Jerome Charyn, who revealed the inner lives of iconic Americans in his previous novels, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson and I Am Abraham, uncovers the hidden layers of an enigmatic personality.