The Holocaust in the Nursery: Anita Desai’s 'Baumgartner’s Bombay'

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.