Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski was born in Poland in 1933 to Russian parents who had fled the revolution. He was separated from his family when the Nazis invaded in 1939. For six years he wandered form village to village scorned by East European gypsies who feared his hawk like face and penetrating eyes. He survived German terror by his wits and he was struck dumb from the shock that he underwent from this six-year period of wandering. He was mute from age nine to fourteen.(New Yorker)
Kosinski was later reunited with his family and by the time he was twenty-four, he attained a professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Soon after Kosinski got his job as a professor, he went to America. Within four months of Kosiski ’s arrival in America, he spoke fluent English and moved on to Columbia University. He soon had a great novelist career. He was earning national awards, was married to a millionaire socialite, was earning huge sums of money for his books and screenplay, and played a small part in a movie. He was truly living the “American dream”. (Times Mirror Co.)
Kosinski ’s suicide in 1991 at age fifty-eight shocked the outside world, but didn’t surprise many of his friends. Ever since Kosinski had come to the U.S in 1957, he had become known for his spectrum of sociopathic behavior ranging from mere megalomania to brutal sexual coercion, fraud, and plagiarism. Kosinski was a pathological liar and a control freak. Some say he couldn’t help his lying because any Jew who lived through the Holocaust had to lie to live. It was in Nazi, Poland that Kosinski became an expert storyteller. (JK; pg. 97)
Kosinski ’s third novel, Being There, is about a mentally retarded middle aged man named Chanc...
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... woman who comes from a very rich family. She has plenty of friends and money and she is a good student at Julliard, a school for music. Andrea is not satisfied with what she has and yearns for more. She wants to find out who Goddard is and steal all his money. Just when she has almost fulfilled her dream, she is shot, and left without even her life.
Osten, too, let his greed get the better of him. He was fulfilling the dream which he had worked so hard to fulfill. He was a super-rich super-star and no one knew who he was. He could have had any girl he wanted, yet he chose the, mysterious girl in whom he thought sent him the letters. He fell for Andrea’s trap and was almost killed for it.
Both Being There and Pinball are wonderful novels that satirize human beings. They both teach important lessons and echo in the mind far after they are put down.
truly shocking story of his life. In addition, the book not only focuses on the
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
...manic depressive state which leads her to her suicide. She no longer has a will to repress any untold secrets from the past or perhaps the past. Since she has strayed far from her Christian beliefs, she has given in to the evil that has worked to overcome her. She believes she is finally achieving her freedom when she is only confining herself to one single choice, death. In taking her own life, she for the last time falls into an extremely low mood, disregards anyone but herself, and disobeys the church.
Her struggles are of a flower trying to blossom in a pile of garbage. Growing up in the poor side of the southside of Chicago, Mexican music blasting early in the morning or ducking from the bullets flying in a drive-by shooting. Julia solace is found in her writing, and in her high school English class. Mr. Ingram her English teacher asks her what she wants out of life she cries “I want to go to school. I want to see the word” and “I want so many things sometimes I can’t even stand it. I feel like I’m going to explode.” But Ama doesn’t see it that way, she just tells, Julia, she is a bad daughter because she wants to leave her family. The world is not what it seems. It is filled with evil and bad people that just want to her hurt and take advantage of
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
By means of comic illustration and parody, Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel about the lives of his parents, Vladek and Anja, before and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus Volumes I and II delves into the emotional struggle he faced as a result of his father’s failure to recover from the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. In the novel, Vladek’s inability to cope with the horrors he faced while imprisoned, along with his wife’s tragic death, causes him to become emotionally detached from his son, Art. Consequently, Vladek hinders Art’s emotional growth. However, Art overcomes the emotional trauma his father instilled in him through his writing.
...saw the image as artistic, subsequent events compel us to try and see the image of the Polish girl with Nazis as journalism. In this endeavor, we must uncover as much as possible about the surrounding context. As much as we can, we need to know this girl's particular story. Without a name, date, place, or relevant data, this girl would fall even further backwards into the chapters of unrecorded history.
During the destructive and apprehensive time of the Holocaust, one man accentuated happiness for the children in his orphanage. Janusz Korczak would let the children color on his bald head with crayons, and when the children lost their teeth, he would collect them and use them to build a toy castle. Known as a children’s writer, educator, and hero, Janusz Korczak showed leadership throughout the tragic event known as the Holocaust. Janusz Korczak had an unique early life compared to other children. He always tried to be decorous and positive throughout the Nazi Era. Korczak was memorialized because of his fearlessness. Indeed, Janusz Korczak displayed courage and determination throughout his life.
Pogozhev’s story is rich with detail and it is an enlightening read for anyone seeking more information about this terrible period in history. His vivid recollections of the inhumane treatment of prisoners that occurred leave the reader despairing, but the conviction of the torturers offers some retribution. The prisoners of Auschwitz were stripped of all dignity, yet found solace in each other’s stories and their dreams of freedom.
"The persecution of the Jews in the General Government in Polish territory gradually worsened in its cruelty. In 1939 and 1940 they were forced to wear the Star of David and were herded together and confined in ghettos. In 1941 and 1942 this unadulterated sadism was fully revealed. And then a thinking man, who had overcome his inner cowardice, simply had to help. There was no other choice."
Andreas Gursky Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig and studied in Essen and later Düsseldorf. As winner of the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 1998, Gursky has established himself as one of the leading photographers of his time. He generally photographs landscapes in large colour format - the images are of urban landscapes (the Hong Kong Stock Exchange) both interior and exterior. German artist Andreas Gursky is best known for his billboard-size photographs that inhabit a space between painting and photography, landscape and human concern, animate and inanimate. He often places his large-format camera at a high-angled distance from his subject, creating images that suggest mapping stills from outer space or cyber-technology.
I was not expecting to write about the failure of the educational system when I choose to read Watchmen. However, Walter Kovacs’, or Rorschach, elementary diction is impossible to miss. I remembered the podcast that we listened to during the very first few weeks of class, “The Problem We All With – Part One,” while I was reading Kovacs past and taking note of his limited vocabulary. Characters in the book, like prisoners, strangers, and prison guards, often perceived Kovacs to be mediocre because of his distant personality, unappealing physical characteristics, and elementary diction. However, I have learned, by tying Watchmen to “The Problem We All With – Part One,” that Kovacs’ issues have a deeper, more complex explanation.
...bly too young to work becomes an obsessive gambler winning money for his mother to earn income that grown-ups usually do. Poverty is turned to fortune but turns back to poverty as the boy's mother spends the money hastily because of her greed and selfishness. Then tragically the precious life that she had but did not love who brought her luck comes to a sudden end.
An unexpected request from Sarah's best friend (a writer from the New York Times), asking her to be the focus of a story on the big business of genealogy, leads Sarah believe her wish has come true. However, when she arrives in Ireland to discover her roots, Sarah instead finds her "orphaned" mother's family alive, well, and often under arrest. Stunned and angered by her mother's deceit, Sarah would consider matricide but an onslaught of strange hallucinations and a very attractive yet delusional detective prevent her from plotting in peace.