Yearning, Control, and Creativity: The Carnivorous Bird in Literature and Poetry

During my travels in India, I was captivated by the allure of the carnivorous Indian eagle. Inspired by that experience, this article seeks to examine various motifs associated with literary representations of birds of prey. The first section explores the motifs of physiological and androgynal bisexuality associated with these creatures, and the androgynous motif of them as expressed in the works of Jerzy Kosiński and Sarah Sheila. The work of Abraham Mapo, and William Shakespeare’s poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” are the basis of the next discussion about aspects of the experience of transitions between the different stages of life. By exploring the poetry of Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Yonatan, and others, this section also studies the elements of aggression and control as symbolized by the spiritual soaring of a bird above the fields of reality. In its final section, the article discusses the wild bird as a noble expression of supreme creative inspiration, an encounter with the deity, and prophetic inspiration. Beyond the dynamics between bisexuality, the difficulties of transition, and noble certainty, the article finds that bisexual desire is often replaced by a desire to control the other, and these forces undergo a process of refinement and purification through the development of meaningful creative lives.

Bagpipe Players and Painted Birds: Some Reflections on Writing the History of the People in the Marshes from a German Perspective

The article adopts an approach to the history of Belarus’, which plays with imaginations. It opens up two vistas concerning the past that are marked by fictional texts. The former belongs to developments before World War I and is connected with a short story by Jakub Kolas, whereas the latter attends to events of World War II and is related to a novel by Jerzy Kosiński. In both cases supplements to the main texts offer insights into Soviet history, on the one hand into the era of revolutionary culture of the 1920s, and on the other hand into the political thaw of the 1950s. The result is an illustration of the metamorphoses that took place in the transitional region of Central and Eastern Europe in the process of Soviet modernization.

The Return of the Troublesome Bird: Jerzy Kosiński and Polish–Jewish Relations

This chapter focuses on Jerzy Kosiński, author of The Painted Bird (Malowany ptak). Many critics, both Polish and otherwise, have stressed the influence on Kosiński's fiction of his background as a sociologist. Those who like his work have said that being a sociologist gave him some insights; his detractors have claimed either that his books read more like academic studies than fiction, or else that he used his sociological expertise to determine what would interest readers and critics at that particular time. Paradoxically, Kosiński himself became something of a sociological phenomenon, primarily but not exclusively because of The Painted Bird, and he occasioned debate that offered excellent material for sociological study of particular strains in Polish thought, Polish–Jewish relations, anti- and philosemitism, political divisions in Polish society, and the complex and ambivalent Polish use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. The chapter goes on to show that reading about the various approaches to Kosiński may prove more interesting than reading Kosiński himself.