The Painted Bird is a controversial 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosinski which describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a "Gypsy or Jewish stray," wandering about small towns scattered around Eastern Europe. The story was originally introduced by Kosiński to Houghton Mifflin as autobiographical. It was only upon its publication that he quietly refrained from making such claims any further. Assumed by reviewers to be a memoir of a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust telling the supposed true story of his futile search for his deported family, the book received enthusiastic reviews. However, within two decades it was discovered that the story was not only fictional but also plagiarized from popular books written in the Polish language, unknown to English readers. In a series of a