When Jerzy Kosinski's novel The Painted Bird was published on 15 October 1965, The New York Times editors assigned the review to Elie Wiesel, the best-known Holocaust writer in America. Wiesel was impressed by The Painted Bird and wrote that the "metamorphosis of the boy's heart" constituted one of the "terrifying elements of the narration" (The New York Times Book Review, 31 October 1965). The narrator, Wiesel continued, "was neither Jew nor gypsy, but a forlorn Christian child of Christian parents." Wiesel's inference that the narrator was Christian was understandable; the author had made the ethnic identity of the boy deliberately ambiguous. At the time of the publication of The Painted Bird, and for several years afterward, Kosinski denied he was Jewish. In 1966 he was invited to speak at a synagogue in Stamford, Connecticut, by Rabbi Alex J. Goldman. Asked by Goldman if the boy in the novel was Kosinski himself, Kosinski...