NONFICTION - Nov. 22, 1992

PASSING BY: Selected Essays, 1962-1991 by Jerzy Kosinski (Random House: $23; 262 pp.). When Jerzy Kosinski killed himself last year, many of his fans and friends were stumped: Why only a few hours earlier, said writer Gay Talese, Kosinski had been entertaining at my apartment, “as cheerful and smart as ever.” Kosinski seemed to embody the kind of optimism of people gifted with a second chance at life. Arriving penniless in the U.S. after having narrowly escaped the Holocaust, he borrowed money to make a living as a trucker, taught himself English by memorizing Shakespeare and then used his new language skills to become an assured novelist and intimate of stars such as Henry Kissinger and Warren Beatty. Readers of this uneven but revealing collection, however, will be less surprised at Kosinski’s suicide. He may have traveled high socially, but spiritually, these essays suggest, Kosinski was still a boy in Poland, abandoned by the friends to whom his parents had entrusted him and forced to beg for food and shelter among peasants. Kosinski won the peasants’ sympathy by telling stories, which, for the purposes of uplift, were only loosely autobiographical (a style that later led one insensitive Village Voice critic to call him a liar). Often in these essays Kosinski genuinely seems to believe in his own pretense, writing all too confidently, for instance, that the Jews have managed to clean the “well of Jewish heritage” of all ashes from the Final Solution. But occasionally he acknowledges that his optimism is actually a fragile existential feat. Remembering the once lively Jewish community of Kazimierz, Poland, he ponders the difficulty of choosing “a state of mind based on life” over “one immersed in shadows that my memory casts on my soul.” “Every single moment I face the dilemma: Shall I become like Auschwitz or like Kazimierz? History offers both--an element of life and genius, and one of inertia and death.”