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Bambi Abroad, 1924–1954

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2020

Maya Balakirsky Katz
Maya Balakirsky Katz*
Affiliation:
Bar-Ilan University
*
mkatz307@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper explores the visual sources that inspired Felix Salten's Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923), and its postpublication legacy in America, Poland, India, Israel, and Russia. While both Jewish and non-Jewish artists embraced the hunted deer motif as their own “national folktale,” the Jewish roots of the visual motif are critical to understanding the revisions and adaptations of the tale in the mid-twentieth century. The case of the myriad revamps of Bambi demonstrates that the nationalist idiom was so elastic in the mid-twentieth century that it functioned as an aesthetic mode rather than an a priori category of identity. At the center of the analysis is the contention that Jewish artists, filmmakers, and writers used the aesthetic properties of the nationalist idiom not only to forge a path to political agency but also to build a shelter from the nation-state.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , November 2020 , pp. 286 - 316
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Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2020

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Menachem Rephun and Menachem Wecker for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

References

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33. Print run reported in publisher's preface.

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53. Yuri Nagibin, Dnevnik [Diary], ed. Yuri Kuvaldin (Moscow: Knizhnii Sad, 1996). Available online at http://kuvaldinur.narod.ru/kuvaldin-ru/nagibin-dnevnik.html.

54. For the issue of religion in the translation of Bambi in communist Slovene, see Pokorn, Nike K., “A World without God,” in Why Translation Studies Matters, ed. Gile, Daniel, Hansen, Gyde, and K., Nike Pokorn (Amsterdam: Benjamins Translation Library, 2010), 57–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mineralova, Irina, ed., Zarubezhnye detskie pisateli v Rossii: Biobibliograpficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Flinta, 2011), 178–81Google Scholar.

55. Salten, Bambi, trans. Chambers.

56. Felix Salten, Bambi, trans. Yuri Nagibin (1946; Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Detskoi Literatury Ministerstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1957).

57. Salten, Bambi, trans. Nagibin.

58. Platt, David, ed., Celluloid Power: Social Film Criticism from The Birth of a Nation to Judgement at Nuremberg (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 436Google Scholar.

59. See “A Speech by Mikhail Romm,” Commentary, December 1963, 433–37. On March 4, 1949, the Minister of Cinematography (then Bolshakov) published a personal attack on the Jewish film director Leonid Trauberg in Pravda, accusing him as “the ringleader of the cosmopolitans of the cinema.”

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61. “Moscow: No Bambi,” Life, October 25, 1948, 57.

62. Ibid., 60.

63. This was reported in “The Russian Example of What Constitutes Sinister Influence,” Harrison's Reports 30, no. 45, November 6, 1948, 11.

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77. “Na studii Soiuzmul'tfil’m,” Iskusstvo kino 3 (March 1954): 122–23. For India's warm response to the festival and its films, see articles by Indian filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in “Druzhba nashikh stran—zalog mira vo vsem mire,” Iskusstvo kino 11 (November 1954): 117; “Novye raboty indiiskikh kinematografistov,” Iskusstvo kino 2 (February 1956): 86–89; “Narod govorit c narodom,” Ogoniok, October 28, 1956, 17.

78. Comment by Voronov in the postproduction Artistic Council Meeting of June 15, 1954, in Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 2469, op. 1, d. 262, 4.

79. This cultural forgetting is also due to the return of Nagibin's Russian translation in the post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Nagibin's translation enjoyed many editions, with dozens of illustrators, including Georgii Evlampievich Nikol'skii (Moscow: Detskaia literatura, 1957); H. A. Avrutis (Novosibirsk: Novosibirsk Book Publishing House, 1958), and artist L. Kuznetsov's 1972 filmstrip (Moscow, Studio DiaFilm).

80. Katz, Drawing the Iron Curtain, 1–26.

81. David Robinson, personal communication, December 12, 2016; December 14, 2016. I thank Ilia Rodov for relating a conversation with Anna Atamanov, October 30, 2017, in which the daughter of the director of The Golden Antelope recalled Abramov very well and confirmed his Jewish origins.

82. See Nik. Abramov, “Premirovannye Amerikanskie fil'my 1945 goda,” Iskusstvo kino 4 (April 1946): 31. Abramov would devote a full-length study to the cinematographic treatment of the war in Kinoiskusstvo Zapada o voine (Moscow: Nauka, 1965). See also, Abramov, Nikolai, “Mul'tfil’m: Politika, filosofiia, poeziia,” in Mify i real'nost’: Zarubezhnod kino segodnia. Sbornik statei; vypusk 6, ed. Shaternikova, M. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 192–211Google Scholar.

83. RGALI, f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1110, 2, 20.

84. Ibid., 20.

85. Ibid., 20–23.

86. Ibid., 22, 38.

87. Ibid., 16.

88. On the editing of Jewish representations of the war, see Gershenson, Olga, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. RGALI, f. 2469, op. 1, d. 1110, 23.

90. Ibid., 16.

91. Including assistant director Roman Kachanov (1921–1993), whose family was murdered in Smolensk; artist Leonid Shvartsman (b. 1920), whose Jewish hometown was destroyed in Minsk; composer Vladimir Jurowski (1915–1972), who hailed from a destroyed Jewish town in the Kiev environs and joined the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) alongside his father-in-law, who was instrumental in bringing Golda Meir to Moscow in 1948; and composer Grigorii Gamburg (1900–1967), who had been active in Jewish music in the 1920s but had lost his entire family and childhood home in Warsaw during the war.

92. Samatar, Sofia, “Spectacle of the Other: Recreating A Thousand and One Nights in Film,” in Fairy-Tale Films beyond Disney: International Perspectives, ed. Zipes, Jack, Greenhill, Pauline, and Magnus-Johnston, Kendra (New York: Routledge, 2016), 39Google Scholar.

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94. Interview with Leonid Shvartsman, https://moslenta.ru/city/schwartzman_2.htm.

95. In the illustrated script series Filmy-skazki 3 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955) (republished in 1966 and 1976), an image of the leaping antelope based on Shvartsman's design appears on the inside cover.

96. See http://izvestia.ru/news/590748. See the description by Jewish artistic director Leonid Shvartsman in Kapok, Sergei, “Mastera durakovalyaniya,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 80 (2006): 237Google Scholar. Abramova, N. N., Klassik po imeni Lelia v strane Mul'tiplika’tsii (Moscow: Kluch-S, 2010)Google Scholar, 12, 40, 52.

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98. Sh. Friedman to Golda Meyerson, telegraph, September 21, 1948, reprinted [in Hebrew] in Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations, 1941–53, ed. Eytan Bentsur and Boris Leonidovich Kolokolov (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 2:620.

99. Gerald Cohen, “When Is a First Day Cover Not a First Day Cover?,” The Israel Philatelist (December 1996): 7676.

100. Freundlich, Yehoshua, ed., Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, vol. 1, May 14–September 1948 (Jerusalem: printed by the Government Printer at Hamakor Press, 1981), xiiiGoogle Scholar.

101. For statistical information on this stamp, see S. Abraham and E. Rabinowitz, “75th Anniversary of the Universal Postal Union,” The Israel Philatelist (August 1994): 7072. For other variations, see William D. Farber, “Postmarks and Post Offices of Israel,” The Israel Philatelist (August 2000): 140–45; David J. Simmons, “Basic Israel Philately-Second Edition-Part 2,” The Israel Philatelist (October 2001): 191–92.