This ultimately eluded him, though not Siegmund, who weathered a youth partly spent in a working-class district where antisemitism was far from genteel. Not long after Siegmund’s birth his father moved the family to Vienna in search of a better life. But if the novel can flag, the tale behind it is compelling.įelix Salten (1869-1945) was born Siegmund Salzmann into a Hungarian Jewish household. Anthropomorphism is hard to pull off, and Salten doesn’t always succeed, although a conversation between two leaves about death does work.

It may not be for children but is written in a style that is sometimes childish or, to be kind, faux-Aesopian. Twenty-first century adults might struggle to get much enjoyment from this book. Zipes has also written an informative introduction, albeit one that is unmistakably the work of someone on the left side of the political woods: The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a new, more precise translation of Salten’s original by Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. The translation sold well but was eclipsed by Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), an eclipse probably prolonged by a questionable interpretation of US copyright law. It debuted in America in 1928 as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, translated by none other than Whittaker Chambers, already a communist, but not yet in the Soviet agent phase of his astoundingly protean career. Felix Salten wrote Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde in Vienna, where it appeared as a newspaper serial in 1922 before being published in book form in Germany the following year. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film had been preceded by a novel. If it had, I would not have expected that its story and backstory would, among other surprises, include the Nazis, a communist, pornography and talking leaves.

It never occurred to me that one day, I would review Bambi (the novel).

Bambi by Felix Salten