4 | JULY 27 • 2023
guest column
Leopoldstadt — What Does It Tell Us
About What We Face Today?
L
eopoldstadt — Tom
Stoppard’s play about his
family’s Jewish heritage
recently won four Tony Awards
including one for “Best Play.
”
First performed in London in
2020, the play
quickly closed
due to COVID,
but re-opened
to rave reviews
in New York last
year. Its depiction
of Jewish identity
amid growing
antisemitism
seems particularly relevant
today.
Leopoldstadt is the story
of the fictional Merz fami-
ly —Viennese Jews who are
educated, intermarried and
successfully assimilated into
upper middle class Austrian
society. It is inspired by
Stoppard’s own background;
he was born Tomas Straussler
in Czechoslovakia. His mother
told Stoppard said that she
didn’t really think about being
Jewish until 1939. Stoppard’s
father was a doctor employed
by a large Czech shoe man-
ufacturer, and his supervisor
arranged for the family to flee
to Singapore just before the
Nazis invaded.
Well into adulthood,
Stoppard, 86, knew virtually
nothing about his Jewish her-
itage due in part to his father’s
early death in World War II
and his mother’s subsequent
marriage to a British army offi-
cer who wanted them to forget
the past and become very
British. Eventually, Stoppard
learned that his four Jewish
grandparents and several great-
aunts died in the Holocaust.
Leopoldstadt’s Merz fam-
ily underestimates the Nazi
threat to all Jews, regardless of
their religious practices and
professional or civic accom-
plishments. The Nazis didn’t
care whether Jews celebrat-
ed Christmas or Chanukah
or both. Having one Jewish
grandparent was enough to be
a target.
On Kristallnacht, when a
Christian friend arrives at the
Merz home and urges them to
leave immediately, each family
member has a different reason
for not doing so. One elderly
man is caring for his terminally
ill wife. One relative concedes
that things are bad but bearable
and unlikely to get worse.
Another relative wants to
remain in Vienna to ensure
that his business, which he has
already placed in the name of
a Christian employee, is main-
tained for his son to inherit. A
few others are unsure about
where they could emigrate and
how they could survive. Many
European Jews wrestled with
such grim choices.
Their plight evokes the
phrase “failure of imagina-
tion,
” which was cited in the
9/11 report. Who could have
foreseen the killing of millions
of Jews during World War II?
Who could have foreseen the
murder of 11 Jews at the Tree
of Life Synagogue in 2018?
Perhaps the play’s most
poignant moment occurs
when the Stoppard-like British
character meets with sever-
al cousins who survived the
Holocaust. Then he learns that
many of his relatives, including
both those who were Jewish
and not so Jewish, had died
in the Holocaust. Ironically,
he realizes that despite being
raised as British and non-Jew-
ish, he is the only surviving
family member who is “100
percent Jewish” with Jewish
parents and grandparents,
unlike his cousins. He is left
with guilt and questions about
his identity.
With antisemitism and rac-
ism on the rise in the U.S., it
seems reasonable to be anxious.
In 2004, Philip Roth wrote The
Plot Against America — a novel
in which Charles Lindbergh, an
isolationist who praised Hitler,
defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt
in 1940. The novel depicts
how life changed for a Jewish
family as antisemitism and
persecution of American Jews
increases during Lindbergh’s
presidency.
But it is important to focus
on what is different today
versus Europe and the U.S.
in the 1930s and 1940s. As
online, verbal and physical
threats and vandalism against
Jewish individuals, schools
and synagogues have occurred
PURELY COMMENTARY
continued on page 5
Shari S.
Cohen
Contributing
Writer
The Broadway
Company of
Leopoldstat.