Girl, Lamp and Soap
Isha Drew has left us! No, I don’t mean like Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski or Elias Canetti, Isha has merely unsubscribed from this astoundingly informative and humane substack!
Isha was upset many of us dismissed Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen as just fiction, which it technically is. Further, his suicide by gas at age 28 seemed to authenticate, for Isha, his Auschwitz experience. “Why would he lie?” she asked.
Telling stories, people often exaggerate, misspeak or misremember. Victims lie to gain sympathy or retaliate. Seducers, sadists, masochists, cowards, politicians, charmers and the easily embarrassed also lie. People lie out of pity or boredom. “You were good,” she said with a straight face.
As for Borowski, he published in Stalinist Poland! Though his dad had been condemned to hard labor above the Artic Circle and his mom had been sent to Siberia, Borowski couldn’t address those horrific ordeals. It was kosher, though, to go on about Nazi death camps and gas chambers. Jewish critic Jan Kott deemed Borowski “the greatest hope of the Communist party, as well as its apostle and inquisitor.” To survive, Borowski had to ignore what the Commies had done to his parents.
Kosinski, another Pole, lied his ass off and also killed himself. Thoroughly exposed as a plagiarist and chronic liar, Kosinski may have been shamed to death. NYC’s Yeshiva University or Tel Aviv University should hire me to teach a Holocaust literature course. Analysing Elie Weisel, Anne Frank, Jerzy Kosinski and Binjamin Wilkomirski, etc., we’ll sniff out all the bullshit just using our common sense.