Tom Stoppard did something no writer had ever done before: He wrote his masterpiece at the age of 82, after having written other masterpieces that would have been the capstones of any other writer’s career in his thirties, his forties, his fifties, and his sixties. That masterpiece was Leopoldstadt, and it was first staged in January 2020—45 years after the initial production of his first unambiguously great work, the astoundingly inventive and thrillingly alive farce called Travesties. It had come to the stage eight years after Stopped had stunned the theatrical world at the age of 29 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an unclassifiable homage-tribute-jape that tossed Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett into a blender. But like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Travesties was something of a literary game, and Stoppard was determined to prove he had deeper stuff within him. He did so with The Real Thing in 1981, a bracing and complex autobiographical comedy about an anti-Communist writer who discovers his radical-chic wife is having an affair and how his desperate efforts to transmute this human catastrophe into amusing art cannot spare him from the pain of the real world.
No one in this era produced more, better, or more consistent work over a longer period of time than Stoppard. Between television, radio, and theater, he wrote 34 plays. Those plays delved into heady intellectual terrain, from the disputes of liberal theorists in pre-revolutionary Russia (The Coast of Utopia) to the mysteries of quantum physics (Hapgood) to the British intellectual ferment at the beginning of the 19th century (Arcadia). Rich, immensely ornate, and written with a grandeur and ambition all but unknown in contemporary letters, Stoppard was literally without peer. For the screen, he had credits on 13 films, and won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love—a project he did not initiate but whose final script is legendary in Hollywood for having taken a bit of fluff which was then alchemized into cinematic gold.
And all this from a writer who was not a native English speaker. Born in Czechoslovakia, his mother and father fled in 1938 to Singapore. His father died there and his mother later married a British officer in India named Stoppard who then adopted him and brought him and his brother to Nottingham in England. Like Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, Stoppard had an outsider’s ability to see the extraordinary playfulness and immense range of the English tongue in a way a native might not be able to.
He went along in the 21st century, writing some screenplays and a couple of other plays, but he was getting on in years, slowing down, as writers do. But then something happened. In 2018, at the age of 81, he began work on a play about the history of a family like his—a history he had not known until he was in his 50s.
He had, of course, known he was Czech. Indeed, his Czech roots and the knowledge of having family suffering behind the Iron Curtain made him one of the few resolute anti-Communists among men of letters during the Cold War. He even joined the steering committee of the Committee for a Free World, an anti-Communist organization founded by my late mother, Midge Decter. But when Stoppard had asked his mother if their family had had Jewish roots, she would say “tsk” and move on.
It turned out the Strausslers and Becks had had more than Jewish “roots.” They were Jews. Stoppard, it turned out, was a Jew. His parents had gone to Singapore because they saw the Nazis coming. And when he finally made contact with some relatives after the Cold War was over, he discovered the whole story.
“My grandparents all died at the hands of the Germans,” he wrote in a 1999 essay. “My father’s parents, Julius and Hildegard Straussler, were part of a ‘transport’ of Moravian Jews taken to Terezin, in Bohemia in northern Czechoslovakia, where they arrived on December 2, 1941. On January 9, 1942, they were among 112 prisoners transported ‘to the East,’ to Riga in Latvia. This is the recorded date of their deaths because it is the last fact known about them. Rudolf and Regina Beck, my mother’s parents, were also transported to Terezin, and died there, in July and April 1944, while we were in India.”
More still: Aunts and uncles and cousins, killed at Auschwitz and at other camps. A relative told him all of this in 1994.
That essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” was about all Stoppard had to say about his relation to Jewishness and Judaism over the course of the following two decades. But then, according to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.’”
This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”
That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”
The richness of the assimilated existences of the Jews of turn-of-the-century Vienna whose Christmas celebration (!) we witness at the play’s beginning is revealed in all its fragility almost immediately; success for the family’s richest member comes in part from his converting to Christianity, but the converted man is soon humiliated for his Jewishness by his wife’s Austrian military-officer lover. The first act features a passionate argument about Zionism and Herzl’s The Jewish State, and the great shadow cast over the rest of the proceedings is if the people in that apartment had heeded Herzl’s call and understood his ideas, they would have moved to Palestine and lived.
Leopoldstadt is a great work of art, and not a tract, but it is the most explicitly Zionist work of art of our time—though the point seems to have sailed over the heads of most of the people who wrote about it in words of extravagant praise. Its celebration and success capped Stoppard’s career not a moment too soon. Because, of course, had he written it three years later and had it been staged in London and New York after October 7th, its Zionism would have been unavoidable to all who saw it, and there would have been protests against it outside the theaters that showed it.
Tom Stoppard chose to stop “living as without history” by writing Leopoldstadt, and in so doing, he brought his career to its apogee with an earnest and passionate piece of work in which he played none of the linguistic games that had made him famous. He wanted to make it known that we must all live with history, with the knowledge of history, with the lessons of history, and not have them erased—either by parents whose journeys were too painful to share with their children and grandchildren or by those who seem determined to forget so that they can commit the same crimes anew, the crimes their grandparents and great-grandparents committed. Tom Stoppard did not live the life of a Jew, but in writing Leopoldstadt, he contributed to the treasure-house of civilization, and for that, he deserves eternal honor. He did good for his people and for the West. May Tom Stoppard’s memory be for a blessing.
