Editor’s note: We’re republishing this story, originally published on Jan. 28, 2022, for the 80th anniversary of the American theatrical release of the animated film “Bambi,” which debuted in U.S. theaters on Aug. 21, 1942.

A prince is born in the forest.

In this idyllic, verdant Eden, birds summon a menagerie of adorable woodland creatures – a mouse washing its face with a drop of dew, a chipmunk using a squirrel’s tail as a blanket. A rabbit thumps his foot on a log and announces the royal birth. The animals gather in a hollow to witness the nativity, cooing over a sleeping fawn. A magisterial owl says, “Well, this is quite the occasion.”

The owl and the rest of the animals congratulate the mother, and all stand in awe as the tiny, white-flecked prince takes his first, faltering steps.

This is how most of the world met Bambi, in a 1942 film by Walt Disney. The source material has a different origin for our hero.

“Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” the 1922 novel by Felix Salten, first translated into English in 1928 by future Soviet spy Whitaker Chambers, begins when Bambi is born in the middle of a thicket, “one of those small hidden places in the forest that appear to be open yet are shielded on all sides.”

In this tiny enclosure, “so small that there was barely enough room for him and his mother,” Bambi is shielded from danger in his earliest, most vulnerable moments. The only one there to greet his birth is a magpie – a nosy one, who Bambi’s mother does not want there, perhaps fearful of too much attention. As Jack Zipes, the author of a new translation of Salten’s novel, “The Original Bambi,” states in his introduction, to be born as an animal in the forest is to be “born to be killed.”

Zipes, a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, at first dismissed a proposal from an academic press to translate Salten’s novel for its 100th anniversary, knowing it primarily through the “miserable Disney film.”

But when Zipes did his research, he immediately noticed the stark difference between the “high aristocratic” birth of the Disney deer and the sheltered, precarious infancy of Salten’s original buck. He was determined to correct people’s misapprehensions about the story’s meaning. “Bambi,” Zipes offers, as others scholars did before him, can be read as an allegory for Jewish persecution.

“Whether he knew it or not, and I think he did know it, ‘Bambi’ sort of predicts what is going to happen with the Holocaust,” he said.

In the book, the animals are constantly hunted. Bambi’s mother is not the only one to die violently; all manner of fauna are disemboweled by their neighbors in the forest or shot by the horrifying “Him” (humankind). The jays and magpies who greet Bambi’s birth are most conspicuous when alerting deer and pheasants to man’s encroachment. Bambi’s first lesson after learning to walk is how to approach an open meadow, where, at the slightest hint of danger, he must be prepared to dart back to the trees.

Zipes and others have argued that “Bambi” is Jewish because Salten was – though his Jewishness took on different forms throughout his life.

Born Siegmund Salzmann in Pest in 1869, to parents who soon after relocated the family to Vienna, Salten changed his name in his teen years in an effort to “unmark” himself as a Jew. He considered converting to Catholicism as he endured the antisemitism of his neighbors, classmates and teachers, and primarily identified as Austrian. Striving to overcome the lost fortune of his entrepreneur father – the son of a rabbi – Salten joined a group of cafe-frequenting writers known as Young Vienna, which included major figures like Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig.

The always over-leveraged Salten took work where he could get it in a number of mediums, but was primarily known as a journalist, critic and hanger-on to the Habsburgs. Salten was also an animal lover and avid hunter who spent many hours observing the wildlife on his hunting preserve, which no doubt informed his animal stories. Later he would distinguish himself from the other members of Jung-Wien by serving as an outspoken advocate for Jewish statehood following the example of fellow Hungarian-Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl.

Herzl’s Zionism appealed to Salten’s robust sense of self-empowerment and self-invention. As Paul Reitter notes in his 2013 Jewish Review of Books essay “Bambi’s Jewish Roots,” Salten wrote a column for Herzl’s paper, Die Welt, and would publish a substantial profile of the Zionist leader after his death in 1904.

In a harsh critique of Zipes’ translation for The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz argues that Salten’s Zionism was conflicted, noting that his column for Die Welt was anonymous and that he “refused to set foot in the newspaper’s offices.”

But Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Ohio State University, who wrote the afterword to a translation of “Bambi,” that will arrive from New York Review Books this summer, takes issue with Schulz’s characterization. While Salten’s column was anonymous, he said, many of his pieces for Die Welt and other Zionist writings, including a 1925 travel book on Mandatory Palestine, appeared under his own name. Salten was also a very public and persuasive Zionist speaker at two “festive evenings” at the Bar Kochba Society in Prague in 1909 and 1911, where he was reported to have upstaged no less an eminence than Martin Buber.

While Schulz implies that a Nazi notion of “Bambi” as a parable of Jewish persecution was the chief reason that it was burned, Reitter believes Salten was more likely marked for the bonfire for his modernist sensibilities, pornographic potboilers and, not least significantly, his Zionist affiliation.

“My own interpretation is that the allegorical representation of Jewish experiences is of a very particular kind,” Reitter said of “Bambi.” “He never really thought seriously about immigrating to Palestine and like a lot of Zionist figures, he was in his way very much an ardent assimilationist.”

Salten was certainly distressed by antisemitism, Reitter said, and wrote passionately about it, but interestingly most of those pieces came before 1918, well before anti-Jewish bigotry intensified as Austrians and Germans blamed Jews for the loss of World War I. The thread of Jewish themes Reitter observes most strongly in “Bambi” has less to do with pervasive persecution than it does with the peculiar content of Salten’s Zionist writing, which called for Jewish “regeneration and renewal through art.”

When Reitter reads how Bambi is frightened and awed by the “primordial” mating call of the kingly giant elks, he detects a direct echo of Salten’s call for Jews to reclaim the “mother sounds” in “the books of Job and Solomon.” It seems to me plausible that, in referring to his deer as princes, Salten is indicating this noble past, which, but for the constant threat of death or deracination, might flourish.