The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski endures as a warning to the world -- do not forget that you, too, have a dark history. It is a look into the brutality a majority can inflict on a misunderstood minority.
Kosinski starts his story with a brief prologue, an introduction that lays a foreboding groundwork for the story that will later unfold in first person narrative. Kosinski immediately sucks you in with his terse reportage:
"In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six-year-old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village.
A man traveling eastward agreed for a substantial payment to find temporary foster parents for the child. Having little choice, the parents entrusted the boy to him."
What follows is a painful look at the climate of hostility and suspicion bred by political and religious doctrine. Considered a Gypsy or a Jewish stray, he was unwelcome nearly everywhere he went, surviving by his wits and by his ability to observe and imitate in order to gain stints of servitude in exchange for meager room and board.
But the boy endures nonetheless, growing mentally by leaps and bounds as he is immersed in the ways of the sorrowful maze of a world he wanders through. While about 99 percent of this novel is troubling -- at times barely readable for the horrors it describes -- there is joy and redemption in the ultimate survival of the "I" through which the story is told.
