Ronit Porat

Born on Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, 1975
Lives and works in Tel Aviv

In 1936, Hitler censored the distribution of Bambi: A Life in the Woods, defining it as a "decadent Jewish" creation. Ronit Porat's works investigate the interwar period in Europe from various perspectives, while focusing on different figures. Bambi's mother serves, in this context, to forge a connection between the period of her creation and the artist's own biography, and to examine the characteristics and roles attributed to mothers. The title of her work - Through the Eyes of a Nightingale - is borrowed from that of an essay by the German writer W. G. Sebald about Jean Amיry - an Austrian-Jewish intellectual and journalist who survived the Holocaust. Amיry's book Beyond Guilt and Atonement (1964) is a philosophical discussion of Auschwitz.


Bambi's Mother

The book Bambi: A Life in the Woods was published in Austria in 1923 by Felix Salten - the pen-name of the Jewish- Viennese writer and journalist Siegmund Salzmann. It is the story of a fawn named Bambi - short for "bambino," the Italian word for "child." The book was an immediate success. Following the release of the 1942 Disney film by this name, "Bambi" became synonymous with the word "fawn." Bambi is a coming-of-age story about leaving the warm and protective maternal sphere for the mature, masculine sphere controlled by the father. Bambi's mother teaches him to make his way through the forest, to familiarize himself with the animals and dangers it harbors, to distinguish between good and evil, and to understand the power relations between the animals. One day, while they are wandering through the forest, his mother is killed by a hunter referred to only as "he," and vanishes from Bambi's life. The Disney film transformed the mother's death into a heartbreaking scene that shocked generations of children. Bambi's father then appears to tell him that his mother will no longer be at his side.