The Holocaust in the nursery: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

Abstract

With particular attention to Anita Desai’s use of German nursery rhymes and children’s songs, this article offers a reading of the Holocaust narrative in her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay in relation to interpretive expectations informed by discourses of the Holocaust and postcolonialism and to the appropriation of the novel to one or the other of these paradigms. It suggests that the novel transcends such interpretive patterns by structurally engaging the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning.

Keywords:

• Anita Desai
• Baumgartner’s Bombay
• Holocaust
• nursery rhymes
• language
• narrative techniques

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin which enabled me to examine unpublished material from the Anita Desai Papers. I would also like to thank the HRC for granting me permission to quote from this material.

Notes

1. Desai’s father was Bengali, her mother German.

2. One reviewer actually made the mistake of ascribing to Desai a German‐Jewish mother (see Popkin), although Desai herself speculates in an interview with Andrew Robinson about her mother’s heritage (2).

3. Intriguingly, as observed by Judith Ornstein, the sizable Jewish communities in Bombay or Calcutta would also have been a significant part of these environs, which Desai chose to disregard.

4. In an earlier draft of the novel, dated 6 October 1986, Desai had chosen a different passage from Eliot’s poem – “There is no end, but addition: the trailing / consequence of further days and hours …” – which suggests an entirely different trajectory to Baumgartner’s story.

5. Predictably, this was an issue also with Desai’s editor, Alicia Yerburgh. In her correspondence with the author she repeatedly suggests reducing the number of German phrases included in the text.

6. “O, you dear Augustin, / All is lost! / Money is lost, / Wallet is lost, / Augustin, too, lies in the dirt. / O, you dear Augustin, / All is lost!” (my translation).

7. “Bake a cake, bake a cake, / the baker calls awake. / He who wants to bake good cake / seven things must take: / eggs and lard, / butter and salt, / milk and flour, / saffron gives the cake its colour [makes it yellow]” (my translation).

8. “Push it into the oven! Push it into the oven!” (my translation).

9. The timeframe obviously was also a concern of Desai’s editor, Alicia Yerburgh, who queried: “Are you sure that Dachau existed as early as this – it must be not much later than 1933, I think, if Hugo is to be at least 18 when he leaves in 1938” (“Notes and Changes”). Dachau concentration camp was, in fact, opened in March 1933.